“The region has benefited from careful macroeconomic policies, including efforts to boost domestic revenue in some commodity-exporting countries”, said Victoria Kwakwa, incoming vice president of World Bank East Asia and Pacific Regional. The bank has kept its projection for 2017 at 6.5 percent.
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It said the Philippines and Vietnam will lead growth, with economies expanding by more than 6 per cent.
Van den Brink said that the state has a monopoly on the importation of rice and that it has gotten exemption from the World Trade Organization (WTO) to continue this until July 2017.
There are also emerging challenges, it said, and these include the ability to sustain the country’s inclusive growth pattern. “The global economy would be much better off with multiple sources of growth”.
In Southeast Asia, the biggest downgrades in growth forecasts were for Indonesia and Malaysia, both commodity exporters.
“The Thai economy shows signs of a nascent recovery but faces headwinds on the path toward a broad-based and sustained recovery”, the report said.
In the meantime, the World Bank said risks to growth continue due to weak remittances from the Middle East and luckluster net exports from a slugglish external demand.
China needs to its reduce leverage, particularly in industrial sectors where overcapacity is most evident, the World Bank said. Poverty rates are expected to fall gradually, with poor households in rural areas affected by falling agricultural prices. “The final stretch of the Aquino administra-tion presents an opportunity to clearly define the “unfinished business” on the economic reform agenda and lay out a practical approach to tackle it for the next administration”.
“What is needed now is to institutionalize the reforms made and to accelerate the economic reform agenda”, it said citing as among the factors here the enhanced competition in sectors with high impact on jobs, securing property rights through systematic and administrative adjudication of land rights, and simplification of business regulations.
In its biannual forecast of the region, the Washington-based development bank says East Asia Pacific, which includes China, will grow at 6.3 percent in 2016 and 6.2 percent in 2017, down from its robust 6.5 percent growth achieved in 2015.
Keeping China out, the region’s developing countries grew by 4.7% in 2015, and the pace of growth will pick up slightly to 4.8% in 2016 and 4.9% in 2017 to 2018, driven by growth in the large Southeast Asian economies, the Bank said.
Its previous forecast in October was 6.4% growth in 2016 and 6.3% in 2017. The report stated that after growing by 4.7 percent in 2015, developing countries in the region will increase to 4.8 percent in 2016, and 4.9 percent in 2017-2018.
The World Bank pointed out that among the major economies in the region, the country is behind only Vietnam and China in terms of growth prospects.
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Economic growth in the East Asia and Pacific region is expected to ease in the coming years, weighed down by slower growth in China, the World Bank Group said in a report released today.
