China’s economy grew 8.7 percent in 2009. This was more than the 8 percent target, despite the global recession that caused global output excluding China to fall about 3 percent. China’s growth outcome is substantially higher than projections made in early 2009. For instance, in our World Bank March 2009 Quarterly Update we projected 6.5 […]
Just as Asian economies started to recover from the global recession, policymakers and markets have started to worry about unwarranted asset price increases. While the worries are global, especially in the case of stock markets, the risks of asset prices bubbles seem particularly high in Asia, where abundant liquidity is driving up prices of all […]
As we were looking at recent developments as background for our China Quarterly Update, which was released yesterday, we had to make up our minds about how well China’s exports are doing. This was necessary because there are conflicting answers to this question. On the one hand, we are reading many reports from the coastal provinces, Guangdong in particular, about how bad things are there in the export industries, with factories closing and migrant workers going back to rural areas. On the other hand, the data on overall export developments suggests exports have held up reasonably well so far, with overall exports in real terms still far outgrowing overall world import growth, implying continued gains in global market share for China (see left hand figure below).
China’s economy is slowing down. After years in which growth seemed only to go up, the pace of growth is moderating, affected by the global slowdown and tightening measures introduced since the fall of 2007 to contain inflation. Nonetheless, data for August on investment and exports surprised on the upside and on current projections the […]