'TIS the season for economic outlooks for the coming year, and the news is nothing if not a bit disheartening. Not from the government here, of course; as always, the Philippine economy is strong, whatever negative indicators are due to external factors and are not that important anyway, and whole-of-nation boom times are just around the corner.

What is maddening about all of these outlooks, whether optimistic or pessimistic, is that whatever handful of indicators they use — never enough to give a credibly comprehensive view of the economy in the first place — the result is always an estimate of gross domestic product (GDP) growth from the baseline of the current year. In other words, next year's GDP will be some percentage higher (or lower) than this year's.