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Gross domestic product (GDP) contracted by 9.5% in 2020, the worst ever in Philippine history. PHILIPPINE STAR/MICHAEL VARCAS
By
Reporter
THE PHILIPPINE ECONOMY suffered its worst annual contraction on record in 2020, even after gross domestic product (GDP) shrank by a slower pace in the fourth quarter, the statistics agency said on Thursday.
Preliminary Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) data showed the country’s GDP contracted by 8.3% in the fourth quarter, a reversal of the 6.7% growth in the fourth quarter of 2019. However, this was better than the revised -11.4% in the third quarter and the record -16.9% in the second quarter.
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MANILA (AFP): The Philippine economy shrank a record 9.5 per cent last year, official data showed Thursday (Jan 28), after coronavirus measures devastated the retail and tourism sectors while a series of natural disasters wrecked crops.
January 28, 2021 | 9:00 pm Font Size
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THE peso weakened versus the dollar on Thursday as the country logged its worst recession on record.
The local unit closed at P48.11 per dollar on Thursday, shedding 3.5 centavos from its P48.075 finish on Wednesday, data from the Bankers Association of the Philippines showed.
The peso opened Thursday’s session lower at P48.115 per dollar. Its intraday low was at P48.145, while its best showing for the session was at P48.097 against the greenback.
Dollars exchanged increased to $1.188 billion on Thursday from $1.123 billion on Wednesday.
The record gross domestic product (GDP) contraction last year caused the peso to decline versus the dollar, Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. Chief Economist Michael L. Ricafort said.
MACROVECTOR / FREEPIK
New techniques of predicting growth have proliferated recently. The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), for instance, has added to its suite of forecasting models, “nowcasting” models, to estimate growth as a measure of domestic demand in formulating monetary policy. The results of these quantitative exercises are exclusively for internal use but BSP’s performance has been satisfactory. Its business cycle model, business and consumer expectations surveys, as well as high-frequency data monitoring have also supported its macroeconomic surveillance.
Other central banks have similarly embarked on nowcasting because relying on quarterly economic and financial data with long lags and frequent revisions would serve very little purpose. Nowcasting yields economic estimates in virtually real-time in lieu of the official measures. Many advanced economies have shifted to this methodology following the exponential improvements in computing power. For instance, the R