The University of Macau (UM) announced yesterday that it has revised its forecast for Macau’s 2023 gross domestic product (GDP) growth, and it now estimates that the city’s economy will grow 47 percent in real terms this year.
The public university announced the revised forecast in a statement yesterday. The university’s annual forecast on Macau’s economy is carried out by a research team consisting of economists from the Department of Economics. The GDP forecast project is administered by the university’s Centre for Macau Studies (CMS).
The research team initially predicted in February this year that Macau’s economy would grow between 20.5 percent and 44.1 percent this year.
According to the statement, the research team has revised its forecast for Macau’s GDP for this year after its observation and analysis of the city’s economic performance over the past several months.
The statement noted that after the three-year impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the local economy, the Macau government adjusted its anti-COVID-19 policy in December last year, after which the number of visitor arrivals began to recover early this year.
The Macau government discontinued its long-running dynamic zero-COVID approach in early December last year.
The statement noted that the number of visitor arrivals from Hong Kong has recovered at the fastest pace, reaching 2.24 million between January and April, which represented 90.2 percent in the same period of the pre-pandemic year of 2019, while Macau recorded 4.62 million visitor arrivals from the mainland between January and April this year, representing 47.3 percent of 2019’s corresponding period.
However, the statement noted, the number of visitor arrivals from all the other regions and countries has only recovered at a slow pace as Macau recorded around 350,000 visitor arrivals from those places between January and April this year, representing only 23.1 percent of the same period of 2019.
Moreover, the statement also noted that with the post-COVID-19 recovery of its tourism sector, Macau’s exports of non-gaming tourism services in real terms reached 23.5 billion patacas in the first quarter of this year, already exceeding the level of the first quarter of 2019. However, the exports of gaming services have only recovered at a relatively slow pace, amounting to 28.3 billion patacas in real terms in the first quarter of this year, which represented only 44.9 percent of the level of the first quarter of 2019.
According to the Statistics and Census Bureau (DSEC), Macau’s GDP rose 38.8 percent year on year in real terms in the first quarter of this year.
The statement said that after its observation and analysis of Macau’s economic performance over the past several months, the research team has revised its estimates of the number of visitor arrivals for this year. According to the statement, the team now expects the number of visitor arrivals in the second quarter of this year to reach 60 percent of 2019’s corresponding period, the third quarter’s number to reach 65 percent of the same period of 2019, and the fourth quarter’s number to reach 70 percent of 2019’s corresponding period.
Accordingly, the statement said, the research team now forecasts that Macau’s 2023 economy will grow 47 percent in real terms, ranging between the team’s most pessimistic estimate of 32.5 percent and the most optimistic estimate of 61.6 percent
