he mood among corporate leaders in the Asia-Pacific region has darkened abruptly in a global economy fraught with risks from geopolitical confrontation and runaway inflation to rising social tension, a new study has found.
The latest Asia-Pacific CEO survey conducted by PwC has found the top executives worried about the world economy as well as the future of their own businesses.
“Sixty-nine percent of Asia-Pacific CEOs believe global economic growth will decline over the next 12 months, compared to last year, when 76 percent felt growth would improve,” according to a press release published by PwC on Wednesday.
“At this time last year, Asia-Pacific CEOs’ optimism hit a 10-year high. Just a year later, we’re seeing a stark reversal of this confidence,” PwC Asia-Pacific and China chairman Raymund Chao was quoted as saying in the press release.
However, Asia-Pacific CEOs are far less pessimistic about the prospects of their own countries than they are about the global economy, and they are also more upbeat about their domestic economies than their global counterparts.
In the region, CEOs in China show the highest level of optimism in their domestic growth, followed by those in India and in Indonesia, based on the view that the global downturn “would have less impact on countries whose economic prosperity is buffered by significant domestic demand”, including Indonesia.
This “translates into a clear mandate to focus on the ‘here and now’: preserve operating profitability and immediate cash flow generation and defer longer-term value creation,” PwC notes in the survey report.
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