The economy shrank a record 9.5 percent last year, official data showed Thursday, after coronavirus measures devastated the retail and tourism sectors while a series of natural disasters wrecked crops.But Acting Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Karl Kendrick Chua said the outlook for this year was “encouraging” as measures introduced to contain the virus are eased further and the country prepares for a vaccination drive.“We will see more economic activity in the months ahead,” Chua said.“This will lead to a strong recovery before the end of the year when the government will have rolled out enough vaccines against COVID-19 for a majority of our people.”Gross domestic product shrank for four straight quarters in 2020, the Philippine Statistics Authority said.The full-year figure was the worst since records began in 1946 and ended more than two decades of annual growth.Accommodation and food services were among the sectors hardest hit by lockdowns and other measures that left millions jobless.A series of typhoons and a volcanic eruption in the natural disaster-prone country also destroyed cash crops.Chua warned a more robust recovery was being hampered by stay-at-home orders for children, which were preventing families visiting shopping malls — the centers of community life and consumer spending in the Philippines.Earlier this week President Rodrigo Duterte overturned a decision by his coronavirus task force to lift the restriction on children aged 10 to 14.“Economic growth will be hard pressed to make a stronger recovery if children and families are restricted from participating in the economy as up to 50 percent of non-essential retail sales are driven by family spending,” Chua said.Once those and other measures are further relaxed, “we see no reason why the economy cannot bounce back”, he added.Last year “will be remembered as the most difficult year in our lives”, Chua said.“The road ahead remains challenging but there is now light at the end of the tunnel.”Gross domestic product (GDP) contracted 8.3 percent in the fourth quarter last year, bringing the full-year average to -9.5 percent, the worst since the end of World War II.National Statistician and Civil Registrar General Dennis Mapa said in an online press briefing that the 9.5-percent contraction surpassed the 7-percent decline posted in the latter part of the Marcos administration in 1984.The decline in GDP in 2020 was a reversal of the 6 percent expansion in 2019.Data showed that the fourth-quarter decline of 8.3 percent was n improvement from the deeper 11.4-percent contraction in the third quarter.Mapa said the agriculture sector declined by 2.5 percent in the fourth quarter and -0.2 percent for the full year.Industry also fell 9.9 percent in the fourth quarter, ending the year with an average -13.1 percent.Services, on the other hand, contracted by 8.4 percent in the fourth quarter and fell 9.1 percent the whole year.The 2020 GDP hit the upper end of the government’s earlier forecast range of a 8.5 to 9.5 percent contraction for the whole year. But it was below the International Monetary Fund’s -9.6 percent forecast for the year.Reading the joint statement of the Duterte administration’s economic managers, Chua said when the government restricted the economy in the second quarter of 2020, GDP fell by 16.9 percent and the unemployment rate rose to 17.7 percent.