China's economy is likely to grow 11.4 percent in the year through the second quarter, partly because the Sars disease outbreak weakened output a year ago, a top government think-tank said on Wednesday.
Beijing's tightening measures had started showing "initial" results, because after adjusting for Sars the figure could be around 9.5 percent, a little slower than the quarter before, said the State Information Centre, a think-tank under the powerful State Development and Reform Commission.
China's growth slowed to 6.7 percent in the year through the second quarter of 2003 from 9.9 percent a quarter earlier after Sars thumped consumption and foreign investment.
"We still expect a soft-landing of the economy and we believe serious inflation is unlikely to occur," said Xu Hongyuan, a senior economist at the think-tank who helped compile the research report, which was carried by the China News Service.
The report was not an official government forecast. China's increasingly lively financial media often carry reports from economic think-tanks arguing the pros and cons of various policy choices such as interest rate hikes.
The State Statistical Bureau is expected to formally release second-quarter economic indicators, such as gross domestic product, in mid-July.
"We cannot simply look at the (headline) growth figure because there was the relatively low base a year earlier," said bureau spokesman Yao Jingyuan. But he declined to elaborate.
Jun Ma, an economist at Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong, forecast the economy would grow 11 percent in the year through the second quarter, but he said it was hard to assess the Sars impact.
Growth could slow to about eight percent in the year through the third quarter as investment growth eased, Ma said.
The central bank has said that China's economic growth and inflation were likely to remain fast in the second quarter but would probably ease later in 2004.
Comments
Comments are closed.