Showing posts with label GDP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GDP. Show all posts

Monday, March 06, 2023

China’s modest economic ambitions – Victor Shih

 

Victor Shih

China limited its GDP growth for 2023 to a modest 5 percent at the opening of the National People’s Congress this weekend. Political analyst Victor Shih explains the background of this lower-than-expected ambition in the Guardian.

The Guardian:

[Premier] Li [Keqiang] began the speech saying Covid-19 and other domestic and international factors had affected the country’s economy “beyond our expectations”.

He announced the government would aim to create about 12m urban jobs, but left room to move with unemployment rates – keeping the urban target at 5.5%, which it was most recently reported as being in December.

Prof Victor Shih at the University of California, San Diego, told the Guardian the targets were “not overly ambitious”, and allowed the government and its incoming new premier a potential “easy victory”.

“They don’t call for any massive stimulus, and that partly stems from a recognition that exports – a main engine of growth for China’s economy in the last three years – will likely not be so strong this coming year,” he said.

The speech also pledged to resolve housing issues for young people, improve welfare provisions to elderly people and “improve the birth support system”. In recent weeks, the CCP has unveiled a number of policies that aim to reverse the declining birthrate by encouraging people to have more children.

Shih said welfare increases and stimulating consumption – another focus of Li’s speech – would require sizeable government funding.

“So a lot of this wording sounds to me like an empty promise in a sense, because it’s unclear where the money would come from unless growth miraculously comes in way beyond expectations.”

More in the Guardian.

Victor Shih is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you looking for more political analysts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

Thursday, July 21, 2022

China's growth might not exceed 4% – Ben Cavender

 

Ben Cavender

Shanghai-based business analyst Ben Cavender does not expect China to resume its role as the engine of the world economy. Annual growth of its GDP might be 4% at most, and not the 7% most have expected till recently, he tells CNBCtv.

CNBCtv:

“We will see some improvement in the back half of the year, but my concern is that it is not going to be quite as strong as maybe a lot of traders or investors might be looking to see. The government is going to take steps to try and increase spending on infrastructure projects and construction and that should help to some extent, but I think overall, we are talking about a fairly weak consumer market.”
“It’s totally unrealistic to think that we are going to see anything like the 5.5 percent that was originally forecast, I think we would be happy getting out of this year, seeing total growth for the year at anywhere above 3 percent,” he added.”…
“Cavender pointed out that it’s not realistic to expect China to continue to deliver a 7 percent growth given the base has grown huge. But he said the world won’t be able to do without China and it will continue to account for over 40 percent of the world’s commodities like refined metals. He also pointed out that, unlike other large economies, China’s central bank has the leeway to drop rates and loosen the monetary policy. Others have argued that it is tough for the PBOC to be dovish and cut rates as the series of rate hikes in the US will mean capital will rush out of China.”
“Recently, many homebuyers have protested publicly and refused to pay their mortgages on yet-to-be delivered homes. Cavender said the unwillingness to pay mortgages points to a larger problem. Many developers in China don’t have the funds to finish pre-sold projects, after the government, since mid-2021 has forced realty companies to pare down debt. The Chinese government has tried to appease consumers, said Cavender by forcing local bodies and banks to provide loans to real estate companies with high retain exposure.”

More at CNBCtv. 

Ben Cavender is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your (online) meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you looking for more financial experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

Monday, May 25, 2020

Is China killing the Hong Kong goose with the golden eggs? - Harry Broadman

Harry Broadman
Former US President Clinton's assistant trade representative Harry Broadman fears China might be killing its Hong Kong goose with the golden eggs. He also sees not providing data on the leadership views on economic growth is foolish, he tells at Bloomberg.

Harry Broadman is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your (virtual) meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more experts on the economic fallout of the cornovirus crisis? Do check out this list.

Friday, February 01, 2019

China's economy is strangled by itself, not the trade war - Harry Broadman

Harry Broadman
Trade talks between Beijing and Washington are on its way, but the trade war is not China's real problems, says economic analyst Harry Broadman. China's economy is strangling itself, he writes in the Financial Times.

Harry Broadman:

The noose around the neck of China’s economy has been getting tighter, but hardly as a result of the tariffs imposed by the US. This is a dangerous myth celebrated by Washington and used as a scapegoat by Beijing.
Rather, the squeeze is largely self-induced. It stems from the lack of further reform — in some cases, the reversal of past reforms — in an economy still heavily dominated by the state and whose largest enterprises remain governed by the Communist party. The power to alter China’s economic fortunes lies largely in Beijing’s own hands.
The overarching symptom is a secular fall in China’s real GDP growth. Except for an upward blip in 2010, the growth rate of the Chinese economy has been on a steady decline over the past 10 years.
Such a pattern cannot be the result of China’s trade war with the US, which began in earnest only last year.
And, despite the US imposition of tariffs, China’s trade surplus has expanded, not contracted.
The trend continues. Last week, Beijing announced that its official recording of real GDP growth for 2018 was 6.6 per cent, the lowest rate China has experienced since 1990, the year following the student protests in Tiananmen Square. Beijing downplayed the news, casting it as fully in line with the government’s forecast for 2018 and a sign of the maturity of the Chinese economy.
Those of us who have worked on the ground in China for decades, however, know full well that even if one takes the country’s official economic statistics at face value (which few of us do), the exercise Beijing utilises to set its growth projections lacks rigour and is tinged by political imperatives.
Worse, the process is almost a tautology: official forecasts for a given year are not released before the year’s start.
Thus, only this March will Beijing unveil 2019’s projection — that is, after a quarter of the year has already passed. That’s a sure-fire way of improving the accuracy of any forecast.
As to China being a mature economy, it’s highly doubtful whether the majority of the country’s citizenry would agree with Beijing’s characterisation.
While a number of reforms put in place since 1978 — some of which have been truly ingenious — have lifted millions out of poverty, many Chinese remain poor by any standard. On a purchasingpower-parity basis, China’s per capita GDP is below the global average. It is on par with countries such as Serbia, the Dominican Republic and Botswana — countries whose economies don’t leap to mind as being mature.
If a precursor to economic maturity is sustained high growth that is widely diffused nationally — no small feat for a country that has a large population and occupies a vast geographic space — China is moving in the opposite direction. Indeed, the IMF forecasts China’s growth to continue to fall, to 6.2 per cent for 2019 and 2020.

More in the Financial Times (reproduced with the kind permission of the author)

Harry Broadman is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more experts on the ongoing trade war between China and the US? Do check out this list.  

Friday, August 10, 2018

Trade war will not derail reform program - Arthur Kroeber

Arthur Kroeber
If the current plans for impose 25% US tariffs on Chinese import are really executed, they will cause damage to China's economy, says economist Arthur Kroeber, author of China's Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know, says at CNBC. But it is unlikely the trade war will derail the long-term reform plans, he adds.

CNBC:
Despite the predictions of a renewed focus on reform, it's unclear whether Beijing will be able to speed up its economic policy changes, which can often take years. 
The government will likely focus on fiscal spending to maintain growth, while the ongoing timetable for structural reform won't be affected, said Arthur Kroeber, head of research at China-focused economic research firm Gavekal Dragonomics. 
The bigger concern for Beijing is whether Trump will forge ahead with 25 percent tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods. That could hit China's GDP by one percentage point or more, Kroeber said.
More at CNBC.

Arthur Kroeber is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more political experts on the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

What does China's GDP mean? - Arthur Kroeber

Arthur Kroeber
Media reported widely the 6.8% GDP growth over the first quarter in 2018 in China, but economist Arthur Kroeber wonders what such a number actually means. Also: the impact of the announced US tariffs on Chinese products would hardly make a dent in economic growth, he tells the South China Morning Post.

The South China Morning Post:
Some analysts say the lack of volatility in the range of the GDP figures has reduced the relevance of the data in gauging the health of the world’s second-biggest economy. 
“Do we have a high degree of accuracy in quarter-to-quarter China GDP as other advanced economies? The answer is no,” said Arthur Kroeber, co-founder and research head of Gavekal-Dragonomics, a research firm. “Chinese government calculation about GDP is basically designed to reduce volatility”. 
Kroeber said China’s economic growth rate was expected to slow over the next two or three years and a trade war with the US might knock off about 0.3 percentage points if it involved the US imposing tariffs on US$100 billion worth of Chinese imports.
More in the South China Morning Post.

Arthur Kroeber is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more financial experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.  

Friday, October 20, 2017

China: Not heading for a financial crisis - Arthur Kroeber

Arthur Kroeber
Debt levels and slower GDP growth are China not pushing into a financial crisis, as some experts want us to believe, says renowned economist Arthur Kroeber in the South China Morning Post. "“There is a double standard at work here, where people have invented the concept of productivity of credit to say bad stuff about China.”

The South China Morning Post:
Arthur Kroeber, founding partner of the China-focused Dragonomics research service, debunked the contention that rising debt levels amid slowing GDP growth suggest China has a credit productivity problem that may tip the world’s second-largest economy into a tailspin. 
In a discussion hosted by the New York-based China Institute, Kroeber pointed out that from the 1960s to the 1990s, the US, Japan and Canada saw their GDP growth decline while debt surged, all without any economic routs. 
“GDP growth steadily decelerated even as credit growth continued to build [in the US, Japan and Canada]. There was no one in the 1980s who was pointing to these numbers saying ‘isn’t this economy heading for a collapse?’ 
“There is a double standard at work here, where people have invented the concept of productivity of credit to say bad stuff about China.”
More in the South China Morning Post.

Arthur Kroeber is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more financial experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.  

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Lower GDP hurts paying back debts - Victor Shih

Victor Shih
Victor Shih
China´s GDP dropped to 6.4% and while many countries would be happy with such a growth, it creates a major problems for China, as current debts cannot be served, warns financial expert Victor Shih in Bloomberg.

Bloomberg:
While in yuan terms the slowdown is more gradual, the decline in nominal GDP gains is still dramatic -- to a 6.4 percent pace at the end of 2015 compared with 10.1 percent back in 2013 and in excess of 18 percent in 2010 and 2011. The slide highlights the need to follow through on slashing excess industrial capacity, eliminating unprofitable enterprises and revving up new drivers of expansion. 
"The biggest problem with plunging nominal GDP growth is that the cash-flow growth to the corporate sector has declined at a time when growth in its debt servicing has accelerated," said Victor Shih, a professor at the University of California at San Diego who studies China’s politics and finance. "Because debt is so much larger than the economy, debt servicing each year will still be two to three times the incremental growth of nominal GDP." 
China’s debt-to-GDP ratio surged to 247 percent last year from 166 percent in 2007, propelled by a lending binge in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Days before the National People’s Congress, the central bank this week lowered the ratio of deposits major banks must hold in reserve, letting them deploy more in lending.
More at Bloomberg.

Victor Shih is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers´request form.

Are you looking for more financial experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Check out this list.  

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

GDP growth in line with our expectations - Ben Cavender

Ben Cavender
Ben Cavender
China´s GDP growth for the fourth quarter of 2015 has been set at 6.8%, lowest since 2009, but very much in line with the expectations, says business analyst Ben Cavender in Money Control. For 2016 he expects the figure to hoover in the mid-6 percent.

Money Control:
Cavender: Everybody has been a bit conservative this year and they should expect somewhere in mid-6 percent range. Realistically we shouldn't expect that we have seen anything faster than that. The government recognises that there has to be a correction towards slightly slower growth model here and that's really as it should be, so should be expected around 6 percent. 
Ekta: 6 percent? 
Cavender: 6.4-6.5 percent. 
Ekta: 6.4-6.5 percent is your expectation for 2016? 
Cavender: Yes that's correct. 
Nigel: Over the last couple of days we have seen some stability come about in the Chinese currency at around 6.55 odd marks. What is your reading of that? Is that likely to percolate to the market on the whole? 
Cavender: We are going to see currency devaluation going forward and we are probably going to see the government trying to keep a bit more stability going forward. They are going to try and kicks some jitters out of the market here. If the currency is more stable then that should help the market in China. Obviously at the beginning of the year has been extremely rough for a lot of markets but if things stabilise here in China, it should make it easier for other countries in terms of currencies.
More in Money Control.

Ben Cavender is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers´request form.

Are you looking for more experts on managing your China risk? Do check out this list.  

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

China: expected to continue economic growth - Arthur Kroeber

Arthur Kroeber
Europe and the US might be bracing for another economic hit, but economic analyst Arthur Kroeber explains in The Financial Times why he expects China to continue growing - in stead of crashing like others predict.

Private consumption in China is low, 33 percent of its GDP today, while its neighbors spend at least 50 percent on consumption. How is this working out in China, where sales of luxury goods and cars have been picking up over the past few years?

The Financial Times:
How to reconcile this paradox? Arthur Kroeber, managing director of Gavekal Dragonomics, an economic consultancy, has an explanation. He argues that China’s private consumption has actually accelerated from around 7 per cent in the late 1990s to around 10 per cent a decade later (although growth did slow noticeably in 2010). Kroeber declares that China’s real per capita consumption growth in recent years is “the fastest of any country in history”. 
Among the many clouds looming over the world’s economy, it is reassuring to have a ray of sunshine to look ahead to. Kroeber goes further, arguing that China’s very high investment rate of 46 per cent, also the highest in recorded history, may also be a precursor to economic super-stardom rather than the precursor to a crash as several sceptical observers believe it is. The US and Germany ( with investment ratios of more than 20 per cent of GDP when they were industrialising rapidly ) and subsequently Japan and South Korea (more than 30 per cent) also invested more as a percentage of their GDPs than ever seen before, he argues. They then went on to be economic behemoths.
So, like sporting records perhaps, investment as a percentage of GDP is one that is beaten every decade or two. Kroeber predicts that China is at the point when its investment ratio stabilises and then declines “while consumption begins to pick up steam.” He predicts that China will likely grow at a very respectable 8 per cent a year annually for a decade at least.
More in The Financial Times

Arthur Kroeber is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch.
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Thursday, September 01, 2011

Why cutting income tax does not mean much - Arthur Kroeber

China intend to cut income tax for 60 million people, and our economic analyst Arthur Kroeber finds himself - yet again - trying to explain to Western media, why this impressive looking move actually does not mean that much. In the CSM:
Raising the income tax threshold will cost the government 160 billion RMB ($25 billion) in lost revenue, according to the Finance Ministry, but this is “no big deal” for Chinese public finances, according to Arthur Kroeber, head of the Beijing-based Dragonomics economic consultancy. “Fundamentally, China’s fiscal conditions are very strong”, Mr. Kroeber says, pointing to government estimates of a budget deficit below 2 percent this year... Household income has been falling as a share of GDP, relative to corporate and government revenues, for several years, but the new tax breaks are unlikely to reverse that trend because income tax plays such a minor role in China’s economy. “If the government wants to redistribute income from the corporate to the household sector, tax policy is not going to do the trick,” warns Kroeber.
More in the CSM Arthur Kroeber is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch.
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Friday, January 14, 2011

How many Armani shops does Shanghai need?

Another building site
There is no doubt the market for luxury products is growing fast in China. A recent Hurun report documented just that. China counts almost a million millionaires, who seem to be willing to spend part of their capital on consumer goods. But luxury goods for the very rich are just a limited part of a very special market.
For the luxury market a lower segment of the consumers - some might call it the middle class - are needed to draw their wallets and let that industry run.
Early in my latest Shanghai trip I wondered already how all those new luxury stores in Huaihai Zhonglu would draw enough customers to make a living. Later I would be running into the International Finance Center(IFC) in Pudong, and next door the Super Brand Mall (that had forgotten about its troublesome start) and was now swamped with potential buyers.
And it did not stop there: I could not turn a corner or yet another shopping mall with new stores for Armani, Louis Vuitton, Hermes, Chanel, Cartier, Gucci were under construction. Obvious, every district in Shanghai - where most real estate related matters are decided - thought it needed a shopping mall like their neighbors.
For any count, Shanghai seems to be heading for a glut in the luxury market, and the situation might even be worse when the analysis of economists like Huang Yasheng are correct. Most of Shanghai's GDP is spent by the government, more than on wages for the Shanghainese who are expected to purchase those Gucci bags.
In the past I have been wrong more often, for example when the first waves of giant 5-star hotels moved into Shanghai. Initially, we could not imagine those hotel chains would survive. They did and perhaps only after the WorldExpo, there might be a bit of an overcapacity for 5-star hotels. But I still keep on wondering: how many Armani stores does Shanghai need?
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Tuesday, December 07, 2010

Still: no real Wikileaks stories from China

Montreux 017Fons Tuinstra by Fantake via Flickr
Call me a bit of a cynic, but up to now none of the Wikileaks I have noted in the media have brought any news concerning China. I hope for other countries that the efforts of Mr. Assange have made a bit more sense, but the two major "news" stories on China are really no news at all. We still have some US diplomatic cables to receive, but I'm getting worried.

When I saw the story "break" that China's GDP figures were man-made, it took me an hour to recover. What a display of ignorance! The frustration about those GDP figures being fabricated can only live with journalists who actually believed they were true.
Wikileaks offers mainly nice gossip stories from US diplomats. In one of the Wikileaks a Chinese official was quoted saying that GDP figures in 2007 were man-made. I'm not very good with figures, but when you see that China's provincial GDP figures have been for years, including 2007, all been above the national GDP, then you know there is something rotten. We did not need Wikileads for that.
Most of those figures were also announced in the first ten minutes into the New Year, so you knew they had been fabricated long before year end. Why were they fabricated? Because the bonuses of provincial officials were dependent on them.
And the same goes for the national GDP over the years. Western media have been reporting annually that the national figures were adjusted almost every year to show that there was no economic crisis, or no overheating, depending on what year you look at.
In the past few years a lot has been done by the Chinese official bean counters to improve their scientific value. Disconnecting bonuses from GDP figures was for example a smart move. But I still find those figures very hard to take serious.
Next issue. Wikileaks disclosed the Politburo is working like a cabal of business interests. I looked around after reading this, but there was nobody to share my sense of shock about this nonsense story. Who had every claimed it was no cabal of business interests?
Alright, especially American media were very good in dividing up the politicians in China into two groups, the reds and the blues, the progressives and the conservatives, preferably each with a 'leader' heading for the presidency. I always found that an agreeable way of faking reality to make the complicated Chinese situation slightly consumable for their US audiences, who saw a nice mirror of US politics.
And now, in a sudden discovery through Wikileaks, they discover that their false assumptions on China's politics were false. We Europeans are more used to a slightly more complicated political landscape, so I made often fun of these US "news stories". But that way of wrongly framing the China stories, now got a new twist.

Sight. So, in fact, we did not have any real disclosures from Wikileaks. I always appreciated the thorough insights of US diplomats in China. They had many more opportunities to collect information and analyse it, compared to us, poor foreign correspondents. But Wikileaks still has to disclose that competence.

Update: Glad to see I'm not the only one wondering what the fuzz is about.

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