WHENEVER I hear any municipality or city, my tendency is to know about their competitiveness level, say for example, I am interested to know the classification of the cities and municipalities (first class municipality, second class, and so on and so forth).
This interest sparked when I learned that my beloved municipality, Lemery, belongs to first class municipality (few years back) in terms of its income and population size. And I am always proud to use it as an example in my classroom discussion that it is apt to be recognized as a first class municipality since I have been constantly seeing progress and development there in the past years. I would always use the number of establishments as proof (say for example, the number of Jollibee and other fast food outlets operating in Lemery, as well as the presence of two shopping malls, Xentro Mall and SM). But I didn’t know what happened why until now, its cityhood has not materialized (naunahan pa ng Calaca at Sto Tomas) whereas, if we compare Lemery to these two new component cities, Lemery is relatively more commercialized in terms of number of business establishments.
My dissertation in Doctoral paved the way to knowing a deeper meaning of what a competitive city and municipality is, since one of the theoretical foundations that I used there is the CMCI (Cities and Municipalities Competitiveness Index) inspired from the competitiveness model of Michael Porter.
CMCI evaluates the competitiveness level of cities and municipalities based from the five pillars: economic dynamism, government efficiency, infrastructure, innovation and resiliency. For me, this is a holistic approach to assess the competitiveness level of cities and municipalities, not merely basing from the population size and income level. For instance, economic dynamism looks at a wider picture of the economic status of cities and municipalities (i.e., employment rate, business establishment growth, etc.) on top of the revenue that the city and municipality is making.
CMCI indicators help investors in their decision making since it is making use of various assessment criteria. The innovation indicators of CMCI tells us how they give importance to the growth of entrepreneurial activities in their areas by providing incentives to innovative projects and start-ups, and building innovation and tech hubs to foster entrepreneurial intentions of the citizens.
Meanwhile, the government efficiency pillar indicates the effectiveness of government services as well as the ease in doing business which helps drive business profitability. The quality of infrastructure is also considered as one of the pillars which evaluates how well these infrastructures help facilitate the economic cycle of cities and municipalities.
Lastly, the resiliency pillar looks at the ability of the city or municipality to rise above the occasion or bounce back from calamities and disasters which is also one of the important considerations for businessmen and investors more especially that the Philippines is being frequented by inclement weathers and natural disasters being in the Pacific Ring of Fire. These are the major decision points that investors might consider in choosing the right business location. You may check the CMCI ranking of your city and municipality at https://cmci.dti.gov.ph/.|
