Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has signed executive orders reducing tariffs on imported petroleum products and machineries, local media reported Monday.

President Arroyo signed Executive Order 527 on May 12 reducing tariffs on oil products, DZMM radio reported. EO 527 will take effect for six months.

The report said Arroyo also signed Executive Order 528, which gives zero percent import duty for imported machineries, equipment, spare parts and accessories. EO 528 will be effective for five years.

Finance Secretary Margarito Teves earlier said the lower oil import tariff would help mitigate the impact of high world crude prices.

"It's a sliding scale formula, in other words, if the price of crude oil is at a certain level, we can adjust this by one percentage point. If it still goes up to another level, we can adjust it to two percentage points," Teves told reporters.

Teves said that suspending or lowering the oil import tariff would cost the government roughly 3 billion pesoe (57.7 million U. S. dollars) to 12 billion pesos (230.8 million U.S. dollars) in revenue.

The Philippines, which imports nearly all its daily oil requirement of 330,000 barrels of oil per day, currently has an import tariff of 3 percent.

Source: Xinhua