July 19, 2007
China’s Economy Growing at a Breakneck Pace
By D***ID BARBOZA
SHANGHAI, July 19 — China said today that its economy grew by at an 11.9 percent annual rate in the second quarter of this year, the fastest pace in more than a decade, reigniting fears that the economy is overheating.
The breakneck growth was fueled by a vast trade surplus, by booming retail sales and by huge investments in new factories, roads, bridges and real estate projects.
Analysts say the government in Beijing is now under mounting pressure to rein in growth, either by raising interest rates or by allowing the country’s currency, the yuan or renminbi, to appreciate further against other global currencies, which would slow the growth of exports, make imported goods more competitive and ease pressure on the economy.
“They do need to tighten, but the question is how,” said Frank X. Gong, an economist at J.P. Morgan. “Aggressively hiking interest rates is not the answer.”
The government’s economic statistics continue to stun analysts, who are constantly being forced to revise their growth estimates upward in a country where every major city seems to be in the grip of a building boom.
For the first half of this year, China said, its economy grew at an 11.5 percent annual rate, far outpacing the projections of government and private analysts after two years of double-digit economic growth.
The government had forecast that the economy would grow by about 8 percent this year, and had promised to take steps to ease the country’s huge and widening trade surplus.
But the economy is growing as fast as ever anyway, and the trade surplus expanded to $112 billion in the first half of this year, about 85 percent larger than for the same period in 2006.
Members of the United States Congress are now trying to put greater pressure on China to revalue its currency and to import more American goods. But China has been reluctant to move quickly to lift the value of the yuan, for fear of harming businesses here, and other measures to narrow the trade imbalance with the rest of the world, particularly the United States.
Concerns about overheating were heightened today by another statistic released by the government — that inflation in June was the fastest in years, with China’s consumer price index jumping 4.4 percent, almost entirely because of rising food costs.
The retail prices of eggs and pork have jumped more than 20 percent over the past year, largely because of tighter grain supplies and the outbreak of a disease called blue ear in pigs, the government said.
Many analysts say that inflationary pressure in China may be even greater when measured by a broader basket of goods, and that the trend could signal real problems for the country, particularly if food prices continue to rise.
“This is not benign,” says Hong Liang, an economist at Goldman Sachs. “In a developing country, this gets back to wages very quickly.”
The problem seems to be how to tame China’s phenomenal growth, which has transformed the country over the past 20 years without abating.
No major economy in the past century has grown consistently at anything like the pace now being seen in China, and the country is expected to easily overtake Germany this year as the world’s third largest economy, behind the United States and Japan.
“Even if we are very bullish on China, if they grow above 10 percent, there’s going to be a problem,” Ms. Hong at Goldman Sachs says.
The government has already tried dozens of measures over the past few years, including some interest-rate increases, in an effort to apply the economic brakes, moderate export growth and tame a wild stock market.
But most of them have achieved little, and the economy has kept roaring ahead.
Many analysts expect China to allow its currency to appreciate more quickly in the second half of the year.
Mr. Gong at J.P. Morgan said that China is already signaling that it will allow its currency to appreciate faster in the second half of the year. And he says China should import more agricultural products from the United States which could help ease the trade deficit and contain rising food prices at the same time.
Ms. Hong at Goldman, however, worries about an economy that is growing at an ever faster pace when measured month to month.
“The government needs to tighten policy and slow the economy,” she says. “Hopefully they can find some new tricks.”
主题: La Chine, troisième économie mondiale devant l'Allemagne 
周五 七月 20, 2007 6:50 am