China's Economy on Threshold of Buoyant GrowthChina, saying farewell to lingering side-effects of the Asian economic crisis, is embracing a new round of dynamic economic growth.Chinese economists reached a consensus that the new round of boom began in 2000 and would probably continue for about 8-10 years, before a period of readjustment would come in. They predicted annual Chinese GDP growth rate would hover around 8-10 per cent during the boom, and could rise higher if everything is better handled. The economy has shown a major favorable turn in the first six months of this year, said latest statistics from the National Bureau of Statistics. The recovery, very much expected ever since the 1997 Asian economic crisis battered the whole region, is broadly founded. Investment by the state and the private sectors, gross retail sales, import and export volume have all picked up. "Investment in fixed assets keeps rising at a high rate; domestic consumption, once a bottleneck of the growth, has expanded amazingly, and import and export amounted to new records in the first six month of 2000," said Qiu Xiaohua, deputy director of the National Bureau of Statistics. "All this have proved that China's macro economy is in the threshold of a new boom," he added. In the breakdown of individual industrial lines, profits of iron and steel industry in the first five months of this year hit 3.95 billion yuan (US$475.9 million) and is expected to reach 10 billion yuan (US$1.2 billion) by the end of this year; profits of textile sector rose to 7.99 billion yuan (US$962.6 million); and coal, crude, petro-chemical, building and transportation sectors all reported robust growth. It is the first time the steel, textile, coal and crude industries, which are heavily controlled by the state in China, reported profits since 1997. Shanghai and Shenzhen composite index, which is the barometer of economy, keeps climbing to new highs in the first six months of this year. According to the Standard Chartered Bank, consumption in China contributed 62 per sent of the GDP growth in the first quarter of 2000, as compared with 49 per cent in 1998. Premier Zhu Rongji said in his recent visit to Brussels that China's economy has overcome the difficulties and unfavorable effects arising from the Asian financial crisis. If everything goes well, the Chinese economy this year should register a 7.5 per cent growth rate and could even approach last year's 7.6 per cent, Zhu said. |
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