Economic outlook for 2022: Tenuous optimism

WHEN I was asked to provide an economic forecast for the Philippines for this year's anniversary issue of The Manila Times, I was a bit hesitant for a couple of reasons, the main one being that the last time I attempted this exercise, it was about this same time of the year in 2019. We all know how that turned out.

It is not just the risk of being undone by some unexpected world-changing calamity that makes the value of economic forecasts uncertain. Such forecasts traditionally take a very broad view – there's a reason why it's called "macroeconomics", after all. This means they are rarely relevant or even understandable for anyone whose own economic management scope — household or business — is not on the same scale. Ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of us are not economic policymakers and so the typical economic forecast is an abstraction.