As governments and charitable groups mobilize for typhoon disaster relief, the Philippines does have an important longer-term asset: The underlying strength of its economy.

Rebecca Jackson-Young is an analyst with the Asia team at the Economist Intelligence Unit, and she says the Philippines’ economy was growing at an incredible fast pace of late.

“Even the most resilient of economies would struggle to cope with something of this magnitude … The economy is doing pretty well. … Of the Asian economies, it really is doing very, very well indeed. … It’s really the services, particularly the business processing, things like call centers, that’s really well the growth has been. But also, of course, remittances from overseas workers.”