The Plus-3 economies are continuing to drive regional recovery, especially China, which has fully vaccinated two-thirds of its population against Covid-19, benefiting from effective containment measures that have allowed the domestic economy to open up quite fully, noted the report.
Growth for the Asean sub-region, however, is forecast to be much slower at 2.7 per cent, due to recurring new waves of Covid-19 infections and the retightening of containment measures.
Looking ahead to next year, Amro analysts expect Asean+3 as a whole to grow strongly by 5 per cent. Inflation is projected to rise to 2.9 per cent in 2022, from 2.4 per cent this year.
For the Asean sub-region, they expect gross domestic product (GDP) to grow by 5.8 per cent. Inflation is projected to rise to 3.5 per cent in 2022, from 3 per cent this year.
“This pandemic has been very uneven… in terms of impact and recovery,” noted Amro chief economist Khor Hoe Ee in Thursday’s briefing.
The impact the pandemic has had on economies has been dependent on the structure of the economy, for example, how reliant the country is on the services sector such as tourism, as well as the amount of government support received.
Going forward, vaccinations will play a big role in terms of how rapidly economies recover, he added.
“By and large, what we’re seeing is that the Plus-3 economies have done well, especially China, in terms of containing the pandemic and we expect the Plus-3 economies to grow quite fast compared with Asean countries which were hit quite badly by this last wave of the pandemic,” said Dr Khor.
