【纽约时报】Hope and Caution on Chinese Economy

lydiamm

Hope and Caution on Chinese Economy
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/business/global/23yuan.html

By BETTINA WASSENER Published: April 22, 2009 09.04.22

HONG KONG — Two senior Chinese officials on Wednesday offered differing interpretations on the state of China’s economy, one expressing optimism that the country was on the road to recovery, the other warning that it could be bumpy and slow.

The comments by a top official of China’s central bank and the chief economist of a leading research organization illustrated how hard it is for economists anywhere to reach a consensus on whether China and other leading economies have now put the worst behind them.

A string of recent data has made most observers reasonably confident that the pace of decline has at least slowed in the United States and that China’s economy is likely to pick up again. China is one of the world’s few large economies to avoid outright recession this year, although growth will be well below the double-digit rates before the global financial crisis began.

Yi Gang, a vice governor of the People’s Bank of China, said in Beijing that a two-year stimulus package of 4 trillion yuan, or $585 billion that was announced in November had helped restore confidence and support a growth rate close to the official target of 8 percent this year.

But cautioning that China’s recovery was unlikely to be steady and quick, Fan Jianping, chief economist with the State Information Center, cited the impact of the global financial crisis and structural problems in China’s domestic economy, Reuters reported.

Also on Wednesday, economists at Goldman Sachs raised their forecast for growth this year to 8.3 percent, from 6 percent, the latest in a series of such upgrades. “In the next three quarters, we expect domestic demand growth to further strengthen, bolstered by loose financial conditions and continued policy stimulus,” the economists said in the note announcing their revision.

The banks’ Hong Kong experts now expect the city’s economy to shrink 4 percent in 2009, rather than the 6 percent they had forecast.

By contrast, Standard Chartered Bank’s economists on Wednesday maintained their forecast of 6.8 percent growth for China this year, saying that although major infrastructure spending had helped China’s economy to bounce back in March, “we wonder about the sustainability of this rebound.”
Chinese media reported on Wednesday that China’s registered urban jobless rate, the only official measure of unemployment in China, rose to 4.3 percent at the end of the first quarter from 4.2 percent three months earlier.

There is also growing caution about the huge rally seen on China’s stock market this year. The key Shanghai Composite index has soared 37 percent since the start of 2009, far outpacing other major markets. A report by China Asset Management, the country’s largest fund manager, cautioned this week that valuations had “overshot corporate fundamentals,” and that “speculative trading is now driving the market,” Bloomberg News reported.

livia

认领。。。