While economic contraction eased to 11.5 percent year-on-year in the third quarter following a record second-quarter drop, the country’s chief economist sees more room for improvement during the last three months of 2020 with businesses widely enjoined to resume full operations and more mass transportation options being made available for workers.
Asked by the Inquirer if the pandemic-battered economy still underperformed during the July-to-September period with gross domestic product (GDP) growing by 8 percent quarter-on-quarter, Acting Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Karl Kendrick Chua on Tuesday replied that the turnout could be better as easing quarantine restrictions should have induced faster recovery compared to the second quarter when 75 percent of the economy stopped.
National Statistician Claire Dennis Mapa told a press conference that on a quarter-on-quarter basis, the agriculture sector posted a 1-percent growth, although a slightly slower pace than the 1.1-percent increase in output during the second quarter.
The industry and services sectors recorded a growth of 7.6 percent and 9.5 percent quarter-on-quarter, respectively, but still not enough to reverse the bigger 18-percent and 15.8-percent fall in the second quarter compared to their first-quarter output.
Chua, who heads the state planning agency National Economic and Development Authority (Neda), attributed the worse-than-expected year-on-year decline in third-quarter GDP to the two-week revert to stricter lockdown in Metro Manila and four neighboring provinces accounting for half of the economy in August, on top of the difficulty for workers to resume their jobs due to the lack of public transport.
Read more: https://business.inquirer.net/311509/q4-growth-seen-as-economy-reopens
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