Arsenio Balisacan

Arsenio Balisacan is the current secretary of the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA), a position to which he was appointed by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in June 2022.

Balisacan also previously led NEDA from 2012 to 2016, under the administration of Benigno Aquino III. He resigned from the agency after Aquino appointed him as inaugural chairperson of the Philippine Competition Commission, a position which he held from 2016 to 2022.

For three decades, Balisacan taught at the University of the Philippines School of Economics, where he also served as dean from August 2010 to May 2012.

The son of a tenant farmer from Ilocos Norte, Balisacan was previously undersecretary of the Department of Agriculture, as well as director of the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture, both in the 2000s. He obtained an undergraduate degree in agriculture from Mariano Marcos State University in 1979, a master’s degree in agricultural economics from the University of the Philippines Los Baños in 1982, and a doctorate in economics from the University of Hawaii in the United States in 1985.

Upon his appointment to the Marcos Cabinet, Balisacan said he was looking forward to “working with the economic team and the private sector to bring back the country to its pre-pandemic high-growth trajectory, deliver rapid poverty reduction, and reduce socioeconomic inequality.”