How easy is it to do business in the Philippines and are issues with transparency or corruption easily resolvable?

We have a Board of Investment under the Department of Trade and Industry that was created to advise people on the activities open to foreign investors and incentives available to certain types of business investment. The Philippine Government, however, has a lot of inertia and you don’t run fast here. In our firm we have a large ratio of paralegals to lawyers and their job is to follow papers around in Government offices. They push these application forms from one table to another, to another, making sure they keep moving. If they don’t do this, deals get stranded and don’t move for a long time until the next time somebody follows it up.

There is always this inertia and, oftentimes, it is an opportunity for corruption. One way to get around this is to deploy paralegals, who push on almost a daily basis.