Philippine growth up for best three years since mid-1950s

Manila

PHILIPPINE economic growth accelerated last quarter as government spending and manufacturing output rose, capping the best three years of expansion since the mid-1950s. Stocks rose to a record.

Gross domestic product increased 6.9 per cent in the three months through December from a year earlier, the Philippine Statistics Authority said in Manila on Thursday, after a 5.3 per cent gain in the previous quarter. That beat all estimates in a Bloomberg News survey of 19 economists, where the median was 6 per cent.