Workers are seen in the production line of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles (EV) in a factory in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province, China.
Reuters
BEIJING – China’s National Statistics Office on Wednesday revised its 2019 national growth rate to come down, with major cuts in the manufacturing sector.
The downward adjustment provides the country with a lower base from which to report growth for 2020.
Last year’s GDP now only rose 6.0% to 98.65 trillion yuan ($ 15.1 trillion), up from 6.1%, as previously reported, he said. the office.
The main reason, by far, was the reduction of 503.8 billion yuan ($ 77.115 billion) in manufacturing, or about 2% of the sector’s original contribution to growth in 2019.
“This suggests that the impact of the US-China trade war on China’s manufacturing activity has been underestimated,” Yue Su, chief economist at The Economist Intelligence Unit, said in a statement.
Trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies began to rise in 2018, with friction rising the following year as both countries applied tariffs on each other’s goods and the United States put in place blacklists major Chinese technology companies. Both countries reached a temporary truce with the signing of the first phase trade agreement in January 2020.
The Bureau of Statistics made the biggest upward changes in the tertiary or service industry, with information transmission, software and IT services rising to 70.2 million yuan.
China regularly reviews its GDP figures, often towards the end of the year. Many doubt the accuracy of the statistics, as local governments often face political pressures to achieve predetermined growth targets.
This year, in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, the Chinese central government made a rare decision not to announce a GDP growth target. Overall, analysts forecast growth of approximately 2% in 2020.
For Bruce Pang, head of macro research and strategy at China Renaissance, the large downward adjustment in the secondary or manufacturing industry is in line with efforts to reduce the proportion of this industry in global GDP.
This reduction in last year’s figure also helps the “brightness and quality” of economic growth figures for the coming years, according to Pang, according to a CNBC translation of his comments into Chinese.