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The IMF has again upgraded Philippine growth prospects for this year to 6%. Considering that the institution tends to be very conservative in its forecasts, this has to be really good news.

If things go really well for us in the remaining months of this year, we could beat the forecast and approximate the record 7% growth we posted in 2007.

Growth forecast for the global economy was also upgraded to 4.5%. That revised forecast is one of the major reasons why the world’s stock markets have been surging the past few days — even as there is lingering concern over the apparent weakness of the recovery and the danger of a new round of financial volatility caused by the fiscal problems facing several European economies.

The growth forecast for the Philippine economy is significantly higher than the global average. It is substantially higher than the 3% forecast for the US economy and the gloomy 1% growth expectation for the European economies.

The growth forecast for the global economy, on the other hand, is significantly higher than the expected expansion of the mature industrial economies. This is because much of the anticipated growth will be delivered by the dynamic emerging economies.

China will lead the growth race with forecast growth of well over 10%. The second most populous country, India, is expected to grow at a rate of well over 9%. Other large economies expected to post robust growth are Brazil and Russia. The four large economies are collectively denoted as the BRIC economies.

Together, these four emerging economies compose the principal driver of global growth. Over the next few years, they will continue to account for an increasing share of the world’s economic activity.

Over the next few years, too, the mature industrial economies of Europe, North America and Japan will be trapped in a lower rate of growth. The Japanese economy, for one, always seems to be in peril of a deflation.

What is clear is that the global economy is into a period of substantial rebalancing. There is a sense that the center-of-gravity of the global economy is shifting to the two, heavily populated and rapidly growing economies of China and India.

Because Beijing has yet to fully float its currency, analysts feel that even the pace-setting growth rate posted by China is somehow understated. When China’s currency begins to revalue, its share of the world’s fixed assets and financial resources will be even more magnified.

That shift in the world’s economic center-of-gravity will reflect in changes in the export markets for other emerging economies. It will likewise reflect in the pattern of investment flows between economies.

For instance, in the case of the developing economies of Southeast Asia, China looms not only as a large market for exports. The dynamic economy has become an increasingly important source of investments.

For years, our economic managers have been trying very hard to lift our economy to a higher growth plane. We can only truly bring down poverty levels in our society if we are able to maintain a growth rate of 7% or better in the coming years.

Over the last nine years, we have achieved something truly remarkable: we have maintained consistent growth even during periods of global economic difficulty. That is no mean feat. Historically, the Philippine economy has been trapped in a boom-and-bust cycle. Whatever gains were achieved during the period of boom were wiped out during the episodes of bust.

Hopefully, we have cured the structural problems that caused our economy to swing wildly between boom and bust. That should set a firm foundation for attempting a higher growth plane.

No ifs and buts about it: unless we move to a higher growth plane, we will not significantly bring down the poverty rate. We should not even talk about redistribution if our economy is growing at a rate just barely above the growth of our population.

We will not lift our economy up to a higher growth plane without strategic planning on the part of government. We have to take advantage of opportunities offered by the reconfiguration of the global economy.

For instance, the impressive growth of our tourism industry was accomplished because our tourism marketing effort took proper note of the changing global profile. Rather than continue on trying to market our tourism to Europe, North America and Japan, we focused on the emerging Asian market. China alone has a burgeoning middle class raring to travel. The Chinese middle class is estimated at about 80 million — or nearly the size of our entire population.

Strategic planning will surely direct us to the economic drivers of global growth. China will increasingly become our major economic partner. The revaluation of China’s currency will boost consumer demand in this very large market, widening export opportunities for us. The revaluation will likewise increase the country’s capital stock, making it attractive for many Chinese companies to seek joint ventures in neighboring economies.

We missed the large waves of capital migration from Japan during the seventies and the eighties because of political turbulence and policy uncertainty in our economy. We should not miss the even larger wave of investment flows to neighboring economies everybody expects to happen.

The upgrade in our growth prospects should not be laurel to sit on. It poses the urgent challenge to quickly rebalance our own strategies so that we can finally break through the 7% ceiling on our economic performance. That will happen if we refocus our own national strategy away from the stagnating mature industrial economies and concentrate on the large emerging economies closer to our own.