RIYADH: Amid turmoil in the property market and the looming COVID-19 scare, economists have cut China’s growth forecasts for the current year and 2023.
Bloomberg’s latest quarterly survey of economists predicted that China’s economy was expected to grow by 3.5 percent this year, down from a previous forecast of 3.9 percent.
Even though the median for 2023 remained unchanged at 5.2 percent, growth projections for the first three months of the next year were lowered by 0.1-0.4 percentage points.
The Chinese government had originally set a gross domestic product growth target of 5.5 percent for this year. Due to the recent COVID-19 outbreaks, top officials have been downplaying the goal recently as the growth rate significantly reduced this year.
Adding to the already existing pandemic woes, a property crisis is also impacting Chinese economic growth as homebuyers have started to boycott mortgage payments because of unbuilt houses.
The quarterly survey also noted that full-year inflation is expected to remain unchanged at 2.3 percent for both 2022 and 2023.
The survey further downgraded the retail sales projections for the ongoing quarter from 4 percent to 3.5 percent.
It, however, predicted that export growth will likely remain strong as economists raised their projections for the third quarter to 9.5 percent from 7.9 percent, and for the full year to 8.7 percent from 7.5 percent.
The survey cut down import forecasts to 4 percent for both the third and fourth quarters of this year.