{"id":118989,"date":"2018-01-02T21:27:11","date_gmt":"2018-01-03T02:27:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/countingpips.com\/?p=118989"},"modified":"2018-06-01T15:46:49","modified_gmt":"2018-06-01T15:46:49","slug":"dominican-rep-maintains-rate-sees-higher-2018-growth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/2018\/01\/dominican-rep-maintains-rate-sees-higher-2018-growth\/","title":{"rendered":"Dominican Rep. maintains rate, sees higher 2018 growth"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"inves-922332513\" class=\"inves-below-title-posts inves-entity-placement\"><div id =\"posts_date_custom\"><div align=\"left\">January 2, 2018<\/div><hr style=\"border: none; border-bottom: 3px solid black;\">\r\n<\/div><\/div><p>By <a href=\"http:\/\/www.centralbanknews.info\/\"><u>CentralBankNews.info<\/u><\/a><br \/>\n&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;<span style=\"background-color: white;\"><span style=\"font-family: inherit;\">The Central Bank of the Dominican Republic (BCRD) maintained its monetary policy rate at 5.25 percent and&nbsp;<\/span>forecast<span style=\"font-family: inherit;\">&nbsp;that economic growth would accelerate to between 5.0 and 5.5 percent in 2018 from around 4.5 percent by the end of 2017 as monetary conditions are expected to remain&nbsp;<\/span>favorable<span style=\"font-family: inherit;\">.<\/span><\/span><br \/><span style=\"background-color: white;\">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;The BCRD reiterated its statement from recent months that economic activity had reacted positively to its&nbsp;easing of monetary policy, with credit to the&nbsp;private sector up by around $55 billion since August for&nbsp;annual&nbsp;growth of more than 11.5 percent, helping boost domestic demand.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"background-color: white;\">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Early data from the monthly economic activity indicator showed a 6.8 percent rise in the month of November for annual growth of 4.2 percent in the first 11 months of the year.&nbsp;<\/span><br \/><span style=\"background-color: white;\">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; In the second&nbsp;<\/span>quarter<span style=\"background-color: white;\">&nbsp;the economy of the Dominican Republic grew by an annual rate of 5.3 percent, down from 5.9 percent in the first quarter.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"background-color: white;\">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; On July 31 the BCRD&nbsp;<\/span><span style=\"background-color: white;\">cut its rate by 50 basis points and lowered the legal reserve ratio by 2.2 percentage points.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"background-color: white;\">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; The&nbsp;central bank added international prices of&nbsp;primary goods had continued their upward trend in recent months while&nbsp;international financial conditions remain&nbsp;favorable for emerging&nbsp;economic in the short term due to &#8220;the abundant&nbsp;liquidity worldwide.&#8221;<\/span><br \/><span style=\"background-color: white;\">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; The positive external environment was helping boost foreign exchange earnings and international reserves amid a relatively&nbsp;stable exchange rate.&nbsp;<\/span><br \/><span style=\"background-color: white;\">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;The Dominican peso has steadily depreciated&nbsp;against the U.S. dollar for the last decade and was trading at 48.4 to the dollar today for a&nbsp;decline of 4.5 percent since the start of 2017.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"background-color: white;\">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Headline inflation in the Dominican Republic, which&nbsp;suffered damage from&nbsp;Hurricane Maria in late&nbsp;<\/span>September 2017, rose to 4.14 percent in November, in line with the central bank&#8217;s target range of 4.0 percent, plus\/minus 1.0 percentage point.<br \/><span style=\"background-color: white;\">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;The BCRD has projected that inflation by the end of this year will be around the lower limit of its&nbsp;inflation&nbsp;target.<\/span><br \/>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;Core inflation was 2.31 percent in November.<br \/><span style=\"background-color: white; font-family: inherit;\">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;The World Bank has approved a US$150 million loan to the Dominican Republic to help deal with natural disasters and the bank has said it expects this to support economic activity in the fourth quarter of this year.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"background-color: white; font-family: inherit;\"><br \/><\/span>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.centralbanknews.info\/\">www.CentralBankNews.info<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;<br \/><span style=\"background-color: white;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"background-color: white; font-family: inherit;\">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By CentralBankNews.info &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;The Central Bank of the Dominican Republic (BCRD) maintained its monetary policy rate at 5.25 percent and&nbsp;forecast&nbsp;that economic growth would accelerate to between 5.0 and 5.5 percent in 2018 from around 4.5 percent by the end of 2017 as monetary conditions are expected to remain&nbsp;favorable.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;The BCRD reiterated [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-118989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","no-post-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118989"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":118990,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118989\/revisions\/118990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}