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On January 4, 2021, employees working on a production line of dry-type transformers at an electricity production plant in Haian, east China’s Jiangsu Province.
Stringer | AFP | Getty Images
BEIJING – China announced that its GDP grew 2.3% last year as the world struggles to contain the coronavirus pandemic.
Gross domestic product rose 6.5 percent in the fourth quarter from a year ago, according to official data from the National Bureau of Statistics.
However, Chinese consumers remained reluctant to spend, as retail sales contracted 3.9% for the year. Fourth quarter retail sales were up 4.6% from a year ago.
Online sales of consumer goods grew at a relatively rapid pace of 14.8% last year, according to the bureau of statistics, but the proportion of overall retail sales has remained fairly stable at around a quarter.
Economists expected China to be the only major economy to grow last year, and forecast GDP growth of just over 2%.
Covid-19 first appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of 2019. In an effort to control the virus, Chinese authorities have shut down more than half of the country and the economy has contracted by 6 , 8% in the first three months of 2020.
However, China returned to growth in the second quarter. Economists polled by Reuters predicted that GDP would grow 6.1% in the fourth quarter, faster than the 4.9% pace in the previous quarter.
China’s GDP growth figure this year will come out of a lowered base.
At the end of December, the National Bureau of Statistics lowered China’s official growth rate for 2019 to 6.0%, from 6.1% previously reported. The reduction took place mostly in the manufacturing sector, with factories suffering new US tariffs on billions of dollars of Chinese goods.
– This is the latest news. Please come back for updates.
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