The Asean+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO) has revised downwards its growth forecast for the Philippines in 2022, as it took into account the spread of highly transmissible coronavirus variants which led to tighter restrictions so far this year.
According to the quarterly update of the Asean+3 Regional Economic Outlook released yesterday, the Philippines is expected to grow by 6.2 percent for the year.
In its October report, AMRO had a higher forecast of 6.7 percent.
“2022 growth forecasts for most Asean economies have been revised downward as the spread of the highly transmissible Omicron variant at the beginning of the year necessitated the reimposition of containment measures, including a retightening of border controls,” the report said.
The report added that the need for booster doses is also expected to delay further economic reopening.
“These factors, in addition to the continued spread of the Delta variant, account for the downward adjustment to the growth forecasts for Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Cambodia, Lao PDR and Thailand,” it said.
AMRO however revised upward its forecast for the Philippines’ 2021 growth, to 4.9 percent from the earlier figure of 4.3 percent.
“The Philippines is a very services-oriented economy. If they are able to open up the economy more fully, that will help the services sector recover much more robustly, but at the same time because of the high dependence on the services sector, if they had to close down for any reason because of a new outbreak, a more infectious and more severe mutation of the virus, then I think the Philippines will be affected more,” Hoe Ee Khor, AMRO chief economist, said in a virtual briefing yesterday.
“But what is important is that the vaccination rate in the Philippine has hit about 50 percent and they need to ramp up the vaccination even higher in order to protect the population.
That way they will be able keep the economy much more open for a longer period of time, and that would certainly help the business sector,” he added.
