Lushan quake to have limited impact on Chinese economy (2)

GOVERNMENT STIMULUS TO COUNTERBALANCE LOSSES

In the long term, the money that the Chinese government will invest in rebuilding will "far counterbalance" the losses caused by the earthquake, Foudy said.

"I think what they (the Chinese government) are already doing, which is to say, is to maximize humanitarian aid right now, and then to start planning the rebuilding over the next several quarters," the professor said.

"They are going to probably at some point do some sort of stimulus, even if it's localized on a smaller scale, to help out people in that area," Mark Otto, director of Knight Capital Americas LLC, told Xinhua on Tuesday.

"So that's something that may impact the Chinese economy as a whole going forward in the near term, because that might be one of the first stimulus packages that we are going to see of this year," Otto said.

The Barclays report, using the Wenchuan earthquake as an example, forecasts that spending on post-quake reconstruction could be between 100 billion and 200 billion yuan (between 16.12 billion and 32.26 billion dollars), around 0.2 percent of the national GDP.