Employees working on a dry line transformer production line at a power plant in Haian, Jiangsu Province in eastern China, on January 4, 2021.
Stringer | AFP | Getty Images
BEIJING – China reported that GDP grew by 2.3% last year as the world struggled to contain the coronavirus pandemic.
Gross domestic product increased by 6.5% in the fourth quarter compared to a year ago, according to official data from the National Bureau of Statistics.
However, Chinese consumers remained reluctant to spend, as retail sales contracted by 3.9% per year. Retail sales for the fourth quarter rose 4.6% from a year ago.
Online sales of consumer goods grew at a relatively fast pace of 14.8% last year, the statistics office said, but the share of retail sales generally remained fairly constant at around a quarter.
Economists expected China to be the only major economy to grow last year and predicted that GDP would grow by just over 2%.
Covid-19 first appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019. In an effort to control the virus, Chinese authorities closed more than half of the country and the economy contracted by 6.8% in the first three months. of the year 2020.
However, China returned to growth by the second quarter. Economists surveyed by Reuters predicted that GDP would grow by 6.1% in the fourth quarter, faster than the rate of 4.9% in the previous quarter.
China’s GDP growth figure this year will come from a small base.
At the end of December, the National Bureau of Statistics reduced China’s official growth rate for 2019 to 6.0%, compared to 6.1% previously reported. The reduction was mainly in the manufacturing industry, as factories were dealing with new US tariffs on Chinese goods worth billions of dollars.
“It’s breaking news.” Please check again for updates.