Arkhom bullish on GDP, export growth
Finance Minister Arkhom Termpittayapaisith expects the gross domestic product in 2022 to expand 3.5 to 4.5 per cent, with exports in 2022 exceeding the estimated 5 per cent growth.
Arkhom was speaking at the annual general meeting of the Thai National Shippers’ Council on Wednesday.
“Although the ministry has set the GDP target at 4.5 per cent at most, we believe that with cooperation from the government and private sector we can push this up by 0.1 to 0.3 per cent, despite the Russia-Ukraine conflict,” he said.
“Exports have always been an integral part in pushing economic growth,” Arkhom noted.
“Last year exports expanded 17 per cent year on year, and in the first two months of 2022 we have already seen a 12 per cent expansion.
“A number of financial institutes have predicted that 2022 exports would see a 5 per cent expansion due to the impact of the Russia-Ukraine war, but the ministry believes we can achieve 10 per cent expansion through improvement of logistics and gaining new markets,” he said.
Arkhom said another factor that would help boost economic growth is tourism, but he did not expect it to fully recover just yet from the Covid-19 impact.
“In the past three months we have only seen around 400,000 foreign tourists entering Thailand. If this trend continues throughout the year, we will see just 1.6 million foreign visitors in 2022, which is significantly lower than the estimation,” he said.
“We can only hope the situation does not worsen after Songkran, which will enable the government to further ease travel and entry restrictions just like other countries are doing in this region.”
The Tourism Ministry estimates that Thailand will welcome at least 7 million foreign travellers in 2022, lower than the previous estimation of 10 million. Tourism revenue in 2022 is expected to rise to just 30 per cent of revenue in 2019, which was recorded at 3 trillion baht.
