|
ECONOMIC growth last year may come in lower than
expected, a National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA)
official said, citing the impact of a series of typhoons on the
country’s farm sector, which accounts for a fifth of the domestic
economy.
Dennis M. Arroyo, NEDA director
for planning and policy, told reporters that the country’s gross
domestic product (GDP), which is the total value of goods and
services produced locally, may have grown between 5.3 percent and
5.6 percent.
The government earlier announced
that growth may come in at the low end of its forecast of between
5.5 and 6.1 percent.
Arroyo noted that the five
typhoons that struck the country during the fourth quarter dampened
growth.
The NEDA projected that
agriculture may have expanded between 3.8 percent and 4 percent;
industry, between 5.2 percent and 5.4 percent; and services, 6
percent to 6.3 percent.
For the fourth quarter GDP may
have expanded by 5.1 percent to 5.9 percent, with the farm sector
growing 1.3 to 2.1 percent; industry, 5.5 to 6.4 percent; and
services, 6.4 to 7.3 percent.
“The main drivers for the
economy were the manufacturing, transport and communication, trade,
finance, real estate [and] private services,” Arroyo said.
On the demand side, personal
consumption and exports drove the expansion, he said. The official
GDP data will be released January 31.
In the first three quarters, the
economy grew 5.4 percent. For the third quarter alone, GDP grew 4.8
percent owing to weak manufacturing and agriculture.
The third-quarter performance was
lower than the revised second-quarter growth of 5.8 percent.
On a quarter-on-quarter basis,
the third quarter growth was the lowest since the fourth quarter of
2001.
--Darwin G. Amojelar
|
