Posted on 01 Jun 2015
The Philippines is expected to be among the 10 fastest growing economies in the world by 2023, according to the Center for International Development (CID) at Harvard University.
CID, which serves as Harvard’s leading research hub focused on resolving issues of public policy to generate stable, shared and sustainable prosperity in developing countries, released its new projections on May 7.
CID’s new projections showed the Philippines is expected to have an average annual growth rate of 5.5 percent by 2023, placing 10th out of 128 countries.
The ranking places the Philippines ahead of Turkey (5.3 percent), Indonesia (5.2 percent), Pakistan (5.1 percent) and China (4.6 percent).
The projection is based on the newly released 2013 global trade data and The Atlas of Economic Complexity, an online tool which measures a country’s productive knowledge and provides a forecast on its rate of growth.
Productive knowledge is the knowledge that goes into making products.
“Countries accumulate productive knowledge by developing their respective capacity to make both more products, and products of increasing complexity-this underpins economic growth,” said Ricardo Hausmann, professor of the Practice of Economic Development at Harvard Kennedy School.
The government is targeting a seven to eight percent gross domestic product growth this year, after growing by 6.1 percent last year.
While the economic growth rate of 5.2 percent posted in the first quarter of this year was slower than the 5.6 expansion seen in the same quarter last year, the government is sticking to its 2015 target, noting an average 7.5 percent growth in the next three quarters will allow the county to hit the lower end of the range.
