Pace of Macau GDP decline slows in 4Q amid tourism gains

Mar 08, 2021 Newsdesk Latest News, Macau, Top of the deck  

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Macau’s fourth-quarter exports of gaming services, an important component of the city’s gross domestic product (GDP), saw a narrowing of year-on-year decline relative to that of the third quarter.

Such exports dipped by 70.3 percent year-on-year in the three months to December 31, versus a 93.6-percent year-on-year shrinkage in the third quarter, according to data released on Friday by the city’s Statistics and Census Service.

Fourth-quarter exports of tourism services declined by 48.9 percent year-on-year, compared to a 87.9-percent fall in the third quarter.

“As visitor arrivals recovered from the previous quarter, exports of services dropped at a slower pace, by 61.0 percent year-on-year,” noted the statistics bureau. The number of visitor arrivals to Macu surged by 150.3 percent quarter-on-quarter in the fourth quarter, according to the data.

Macau’s overall GDP shrank by 45.9 percent year-on-year in real terms in the fourth quarter, relative to a 63.8-percent decline in the three months to September 30.

The city’s GDP for the whole of 2020 contracted by 56.3 percent year -on-year in real terms.

Fourth-quarter domestic demand shrank by 6.4 percent year-on-year, a “milder” pace than in the previous quarter, “attributable to a smaller decrease in private consumption expenditure,”  stated the statistics bureau.

Household final consumption expenditure in the domestic market showed a 2.4 percent year-on-year decline, smaller than the 8.4 percent shrinkage year-on-year in the third quarter, with the most recent performance “underpinned” by the Macau government’s “consumption subsidy scheme”.

The implicit deflator of GDP, which measures the overall changes in prices, dropped by 2.0 percent year-on-year in the fourth quarter.

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