In its March outlook, the Washington-based lender projects Indonesia’s GDP to grow 4.4 percent this year, an unchanged figure from its December outlook. 

The forecast stands at the same level as the average growth expected for the East Asia and the Pacific (EAP) region, excluding China and Vietnam.

“Indonesia chose not to fight hard the disease by hurting livelihoods,” World Bank EAP chief economist Aaditya Mattoo told The Jakarta Post in a video interview on Thursday. 

“In a way, it had a more accommodative approach to the disease, which made the economic distress in the short run less a shock than in the Philippines, but the long-term prospects were correspondingly less promising than those in Vietnam."

The outlook noted that Indonesia still largely relied on prolonging mobility restrictions, locally called micro-scale public activity restrictions (PPKM Mikro), to contain the pandemic, whereas countries such as China and Vietnam relied on the more effective mass testing and tracing strategy.

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