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China balances growth and inflation

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2008-10-02 16:00

The slowing GDP growth was yet 0.3 percentage points higher than the average of the past 30 years of the reform and opening up. It was also higher than the 8 percent target fixed by the government earlier this year to cool the breakneck growth.

"The output slowdown was a moderate correction from a high level," says Zhu Zhixin, vice minister of the State Development and Reform Commission (SDRC). "The national economy is heading in the direction expected by the macro-control policy."

China has undergone several major economic ups and downs since its reform started 30 years ago. Each was triggered by overheating, partly resulting from decentralization, pricing policy shifts or forex system reform.

Among ensuing macro controls, the one in the 1984-1986 period was given up halfway and that in the 1989-1990 period caused a hard landing. The macro control drive in the 1993-1996 period ended up with relatively serious deflation because no timely turnaround was achieved for a then tight monetary policy.

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Since September 2007, the country's macro-economic operation had been in an overheated "yellow light zone" for four months running. In view of the situation, the government raised the notion of preventing economic growth shifting from fast growth to growing over-heatedly.

Following the country's macro-control measures, i.e. a tight monetary policy and prudent fiscal policy, the overheating risks that once threatened the economy had been pared. Three major drivers of growth -- investment, consumption and exports -- had maintained a good momentum, says Wang Yiming, a SDRC economist.

"The national economy is now on a normal track as overheating risks recede," says Fan Gang, a member of the Monetary Policy Committee under the People's Bank of China (PBOC), the country's central bank. "For a period of time to come, to ensure economic growth will become the top task of China."

With on-going industrialization and urbanization, China's economy would remain robust and vigorous, as the need to narrow regional disparities would continue providing opportunity for growth, according to NBS spokesman Li Xiaochao.

Economists believed a 9 to 10 percent growth rate was most desirable for the economy, and the growth would slip from last year's 11.9 percent to stand at around 10 percent for 2008.

Though there were many problems and uncertain factors, such as persistent price rises, uncertainties in demand abroad, squeezed corporate profit margins, difficulty in ensuring energy and power supplies, and undue expansion of foreign exchange reserves, the fundamentals that had propped up economic growth had not changed; the Chinese economy would maintain steady and fast growth trend this year, NBS chief economist Yao Jingyuan says.

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