South Asia Seen Resilient as Indonesia Outperforms

Southeast Asia is emerging resilient from a period of global turmoil, with rising investment and domestic consumption that will propel growth in coming years, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said.

Indonesia’s growth will average 6.4 percent from 2013 to 2017, the OECD estimated in a report yesterday, equal to that recorded in the two decades before the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The Philippines will expand about 5.5 percent a year, the OECD said, up from 5 percent in the decade through 2012, according to International Monetary Fund data. Malaysia and Thailand will see gains of about 5.1 percent, the OECD predicted.

The outlook underscores President Barack Obama’s aim to strengthen U.S. trade ties with the region as its middle class swells. Obama today makes the first visit by a sitting American leader to Myanmar, a nation of 55 million people whose economic opening also shows the potential for companies from more industrial Southeast Asian nations to build scale within the region.

“Policy makers have been very active in providing support to boost domestic demand to counter subpar growth in the region’s bigger export markets,” said Euben Paracuelles, a Singapore-based economist at Nomura Holdings Inc. “We’re also seeing fiscal policy being used aggressively as stimulus.”

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