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International Monetary Fund. Asia and Pacific Dept

Abstract

Growth in the first half of 2018 was softer than in 2017, especially in advanced economies. In contrast, growth remained robust in emerging market economies and broadly in line with expectations. After rising to 6.9 percent in 2017, growth in China continued to be strong into the first half of 2018 but has likely slowed since, given the latest high-frequency indicators, including weakening investment growth. In Japan, after exceeding potential for two years, growth dropped into negative territory in the first quarter of 2018 before rebounding sharply in the second quarter. In India, growth continues to recover steadily after the disruptions related to demonetization and the rollout of the goods and services tax in the last fiscal year.1 And in ASEAN-4 economies (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand), growth generally lost momentum in the first half of 2018, except in Thailand.

Reda Cherif
and
Fuad Hasanov
Only a few European economies and Korea and Taiwan Province of China reached high-income status during 1970-2010. Malaysia’s real income per capita increased to 26 percent of the U.S. level in 2010 from 20 percent in 1970. Despite relatively strong growth and a substantial improvement in export sophistication, Malaysia’s total factor productivity lagged behind that of Korea and Taiwan Province of China. We argue that what characterizes their experience in contrast to Malaysia’s is the creation of technologies by domestic firms and a push to leapfrog to the technological frontier at an early stage of development.
Mr. Vladimir Klyuev
Thailand stands out in international comparison as a country with a high dispersion of productivity across sectors. It has especially low labor productivity in agriculture—a sector that employs a much larger share of the population than is typical for a country at Thailand’s level of income. This suggests large potential productivity gains from labor reallocation across sectors, but that process—which made a significant contribution to Thailand’s growth in the past—appears to have stalled lately. This paper establishes these facts and applies a simple model to discuss possible explanations. The reasons include a gap between the skills possessed by rural workers and those required in the modern sectors; the government’s price support programs for several agricultural commodities, particularly rice; and the uniform minimum wage. At the same time, agriculture plays a useful social and economic role as the employer of last resort. The paper makes a number of policy recommendations aimed at facilitating structural transformation in the Thai economy.
Rahul Anand
,
Mr. Kevin C Cheng
,
Sidra Rehman
, and
Ms. Longmei Zhang
Using three distinct approaches—statistical filtering, production function, and multivariate model— this paper estimates potential growth for China, India, and five ASEAN countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam) during 1993–2013. The main findings include: (i) both China and India have recently exhibited a slowdown in potential growth, largely reflecting a decline of total factor productivity (TFP) growth; (ii) by contrast, trend growth for the five ASEAN countries has been rather stable and might even have increased marginally, with the notable exception of Vietnam;(iii) over the longer term, demographic factors will be much more supportive in India and some ASEAN economies than in China, where working-age population should start shrinking, with the overall dependency ratio climbing by the end of this decade. Improving or sustaining potential growth calls for broad structural reforms.
International Monetary Fund
To estimate the New Keynesian model, we use four key macroeconomic series for Thailand. The priors are chosen to reflect general considerations of the appropriate model dynamics and our judgment about the Thai economy. The model is solved initially so that the baseline forecast replicates staff baseline projections over the medium term. We analyze two main risk scenarios, and estimate that the output in Thailand may decline by up to 0.9 percent relative to the baseline. However, the adverse impact on Thai output is likely to be smaller than suggested above.
Mr. Shekhar Aiyar
and
Mr. Ivan Tchakarov
External demand was the main driver of growth in Thailand in 2006 and 2007. However, WEO projections indicate moderating foreign demand in 2008, with U.S. growth being revised downwards to reflect the turmoil in housing and credit markets, and high oil prices. While the share of Thai exports to the US has fallen in recent years, the US remains Thailand's largest export destination. We use a small structural model and Bayesian estimation to assess the possible impact of a U.S. slowdown on Thai growth. We find that a 1 percent slowdown in U.S. growth in 2008-relative to the baseline forecast-could have an upper-bound impact on Thai GDP growth of 0.9 percentage points.
International Monetary Fund
This study discusses the Philippine output gap from three perspectives and evaluates the utility of the approaches for policymaking. Incentives in the Philippines appear broadly comparable with those in neighboring countries. The reform would also improve short- and especially medium-term revenue collection. The general tax provisions and investment incentives in seven east-Asian economies are compared. The analysis focuses on stocks of foreign assets and liabilities and adopts a cross-country perspective to help determine the Philippines’ position within a broader universe of emerging market economies.
Mr. Kenichi Ueda
,
Mr. Gianni De Nicolo
, and
Mr. Luc Laeven
This paper constructs a composite index of corporate governance quality, documents its evolution from 1994 through 2003 in selected emerging and developed economies, and assesses its impact on aggregate and corporate growth and productivity. Our investigation yields three main findings. First, corporate governance quality in most countries has overall improved, although to varying degrees and with a few notable exceptions. Second, the data exhibit cross-country convergence in corporate governance quality with countries that score poorly initially catching up with countries with high corporate governance scores. Third, the impact of improvements in corporate governance quality on traditional measures of real economic activity-GDP growth, productivity growth, and the ratio of investment to GDP- is positive, significant, and quantitatively relevant, and the growth effect is particularly pronounced for industries that are most dependent on external finance.