ONLY two sectors of the economy – mining and quarrying, and real estate – have yet to recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, National Economic and Development Authority Secretary Arsenio Balisacan told the Senate yesterday.
“All the sectors of the economy have already surpassed their pre-pandemic levels as of the first quarter of 2024,” Balisacan said.
He added: “Only mining and property, which account for 6.4 percent of the Philippines’ gross domestic product, have yet to fully recover.”
Balisacan told senators that the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) for the first quarter of 2024 is better than pre-pandemic figures.
“Real GDP per capita picked up to 4.8 percent in the first quarter of 2024 from 4.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2023. This now places us to over 10 percent higher than our pre-pandemic levels. So it took us more than three years, 2021, 2022, 2023, to exceed by 10 percent the levels that we had pre-pandemic,” the NEDA chief said.
He added that three years of economic growth were lost due to the pandemic.
“Remember, 2020 we’re practically shut down; 2021 partially opened; 2022 that’s when we sped up the opening of the economy. That’s essentially it and then of course it slowed down in 2023,” he said.
He attributed the slowdown to global supply chain disruptions “including our own disruption in our domestic supplies.”
The Philippines, under then President Rodrigo Duterte, implemented one of the strictest lockdowns in the world to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
This resulted in the country’s worst economic contraction since World War 2. (ABS-CBN News)
