The primary objective of the economic module is to encourage entrepreneurship on a nationwide scale so that the economic status of the Filipino is elevated above the poverty level.
The overseas Filipinos can mobilize sufficient capital to invest in economic activities that will help the nation achieve sustainable growth that can gradually reduce the level of poverty.
Overseas capital desires to earn reasonable returns on its investment especially in socially desirable projects.
The Philippines has many small-scale products and services that have the potential to be marketed successfully both locally and internationally.
Independent, small-scale enterprises will take a very long time to reach economic size level if it were to depend on organic growth.
We need a business model (or models) that will allow small-scale entrepreneurs to avail themselves of the financial and human resources to be able to achieve competitiveness in their target market.
Competitiveness would require that these businesses must be able to deliver products or services that can stand a reasonable chance of succeeding in its target market.
For economic size to be achieved, integration or collaboration processes must be studied that can put a product, industry or service group into a unified body (formal or informal) in order to make feasible the institutionalization of assistance or inputs that can help the group attain the size and the expertise to produce and market its products and services efficiently.
If organized, the small entrepreneurs can remain as such but they and the members of the group can be managed like a “corporate” body where they will observe correct production and quality standards, proper financial and cost accounting, rational marketing strategies as a first step to meeting world standards.
If this is successfully done, capital would be exposed to less risk and would hopefully flow to those groups with the best potential for profits.
Global Filipino nation can coordinate with DTI or CITEM to help identify which products or services stand a good chance of breaking into the global markets if they receive the managerial assistance and capital to do it right.
Groupings can be done by product, per locality or region, or any other aggrupation that will be most efficient in attaining the goal of integration or collaboration. For example, CITEM sites the Fashion designers group who are very rich in creativity and design, but short in the science of measurement, sizing and pattern making. If they formed into a group then some of them can study and then teach how to combine science and creativity.
Countries like Thailand and Japan have exported their fashion to the countries of Europe. We have the best fashion minds but we have not succeeded in breaking the export market. Why? Because we have not passed quality standards, not in design, but in standardized sizing and other such elements of production that will qualify our Philippine designers to be accepted outside of the Philippines.
Our small entrepreneurs have to start thinking of cooperating and collaborating and while remaining small and independent, they accept that success can come if they grouped together and applied standards that enable them to produce products and services that can be sold nationwide or exported. Marketing and branding is such an expensive exercise and unless there are economies of size,
Global Filipino nations can therefore become the integrator and be the provider of human and financial capital. The small entrepreneurs can be the supplier of the goods and services.
