Employees working on a dry transformer production line at an electricity production plant in Haian, Jiangsu Province, eastern China, on January 4, 2021.
Stringer | AFP | Getty Images
BEIJING – China reported that GDP rose 2.3% last year as the world struggled to contain the coronavirus pandemic.
Gross domestic product grew 6.5% in the fourth quarter compared to a year ago, according to official data from the National Statistics Office.
However, Chinese consumers were reluctant to spend, as retail sales fell 3.9% during the year. Fourth-quarter retail sales were up 4.6% from a year ago.
Online sales of consumer goods rose at a relatively rapid rate of 14.8% last year, the statistics office said, but the proportion of widespread retail sales remained fairly stable around ‘a quarter.
Economists expected China to have been the only major economy to grow last year and predicted that GDP would expand by just over 2%.
Covid-19 first emerged 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 shrank by 6.8%. the first three months of 2020.
However, China returned to growth in the second quarter. Economists surveyed by Reuters predicted that GDP would rise 6.1% in the fourth quarter, faster than the 4.9% rate in the previous quarter.
China’s GDP growth figure this year will fall from the base.
At the end of December, the National Bureau of Statistics reduced China’s official growth rate for 2019 to 6.0%, compared to the 6.1% previously reported. The cut came mainly in the manufacturing industry, as factories faced new U.S. tariffs worth billions of dollars worth of Chinese products.
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