The University of Macau (UM) has lowered its forecast for Macau’s 2024 gross domestic product (GDP) growth to 12.1 percent.
The public university announced its revised forecast in a statement on Friday. The university’s annual forecast for Macau’s economy is carried out by a research team consisting of scholars from its Department of Economics. The GDP forecast project is administered by the university’s Centre for Macau Studies (CMS).
The research team initially predicted in December last year that Macau’s economy would grow between 8.3 and 21.0 percent in real terms in 2024, but in April it revised its forecast for the city’s real GDP growth to 16.8 percent for this year.
According to Friday’s statement, the research team has now revised its forecast for Macau’s 2024 real GDP growth to 12.1 percent after considering the slowdown in the mainland’s economic growth as well as the fact that the year-on-year increase in Macau’s visitor arrival numbers in the second quarter were lower than in the first quarter.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the Chinese mainland’s GDP grew 5.3 percent, 4.7 percent and 4.6 percent year-on-year in real terms in the first, second and third quarters of this year.
The UM statement said that after Macau enjoyed a strong recovery in the number of visitor arrivals in the first quarter, the second quarter’s recovery slowed down. The statement noted that the number of all visitors and the number of visitors from the mainland in the first quarter returned to 85.7 and 84.5 percent of the levels recorded in the same quarter of pre-pandemic 2019, while the number of all visitors and the number from the mainland in the second quarter returned to just 79.0 and 76.4 percent of the ones recorded in 2019’s same quarter.
The statement also noted that Macau’s number of visitor arrivals from the mainland in the first seven months of this year represented 81.3 percent of the level recorded in 2019’s same period.
The statement said that the research team now assumes that in the second half of this year, Macau’s number of visitor arrivals from the mainland will return to 85 percent of the same period of 2019.
Based on this new assumption, according to the statement, the research team now predicts that Macau’s 2024 GDP will grow 12.1 percent in real terms year on year.
According to the Statistics and Census Bureau (DSEC), the number of all visitors and those from the mainland in this year’s third quarter returned to 92.8 and 93.5 percent of the levels recorded in the same quarter of 2019.
The total number of visitors and the number of visitors from the mainland in this year’s first three quarters returned to 85.8 and 84.9 percent of the levels recorded in the same period of 2019, respectively, according to DSEC data.
This file photo taken from the Taipa Houses complex earlier this year shows some of the casino-hotel resorts in Cotai. – Photo: Tony Wong
