A new report helps to deter­mine the need of the Philip­pines after two typhoons that struck the island coun­try in recent months. The report says that the rains will cause another 480,000 peo­ple to slip into poverty.

The typhoons hit the man­u­fac­tur­ing base in the main island of Luzon very hard. The cap­i­tal island pro­vides three fifths of the country’s GDP.

From Reuters, reporters Rose­marie Fran­cisco and Karen Lema give us more details from the study.

Dam­ages and losses to crops, prop­erty, and infra­struc­ture from typhoons Ket­sana and Parma reached nearly $4.4 bil­lion, or 2.7 per­cent of the South­east Asian country’s gross domes­tic prod­uct, accord­ing to the post-disaster needs assess­ment report issued by the World Bank.

The total is well above the $823 mil­lion esti­mate of Manila’s dis­as­ter agency, which only accounted for direct dam­ages and excluded result­ing eco­nomic and prop­erty losses.

“The dis­as­ter is expected to have a neg­a­tive impact on GDP growth in the short term,” said the report, which was done in col­lab­o­ra­tion with other inter­na­tional donors and the Philip­pines government.

“How­ever, once pro­jected pub­lic and pri­vate recov­ery and recon­struc­tion spend­ing are included, the net impact of the dis­as­ters on eco­nomic activ­ity is expected to result in real GDP growth of 1.0 per­cent in 2009 and 3.5 per­cent in 2010.”

The World Bank esti­mates are within the government’s fore­casts of growth hit­ting the low end of its tar­get range of 0.8 to 1.8 per­cent this year and pick­ing up to 2.6–3.6 per­cent in 2010.

Finance Sec­re­tary Mar­gar­ito Teves said the mul­ti­lat­eral lenders had offered to extend around $3 bil­lion worth of grants, con­ces­sional and com­mer­cial loans to the Philip­pines, but he raised con­cern that the money may not arrive in time.

Like

Unlike