标题: Economist, July 20, 2013 (II) [打印本页] 作者: choi 时间: 7-23-2013 15:31 标题: Economist, July 20, 2013 (II) (2) Economic growth | Missing the Mat; Are China’s economic goals at odds with its growth targets?
two consecutive paragraphs:
"Since a cash crunch in June, when its central bank withheld liquidity from the banking system to punish reckless lenders, China has become a big source of worry for the world economy. But the latest figures suggest that the global economy is still hurting China more than the other way round. The country’s domestic demand in the first half of the year was enough to support 9% growth, according to Louis Kuijs of the Royal Bank of Scotland, but weak exports sapped the economy’s momentum.
"This export weakness owes something to the strength of China’s currency. Since 2010, its trade-weighted exchange rate has risen by more than any of the other 60 currencies tracked by the Bank for International Settlements. A strengthened yuan has helped to wean China off export-led growth, but its shift to a consumer-led economy has been more fitful. The IMF this week argued that China’s growth has become 'too reliant on investment and an unsustainable surge in credit.'
My comment:
(a) There is no need to read the rest of the article.
(b) This article is on the mark, in my opinion. Assembling things is a steady source of income for China. Europeans in particular, however, have gotten poorer and poorer, thus unable to afford China's exports (and reducing China's income, something that has no end in sight). China's wants domestic consumption to make up for the gap (dwindling export)--not for the investment in China. In other words, "export weakness" is the culprit of China’s recent economic ills, which it can no longer patch up (as it did with credits in the wake of 2007 financial crisis). A boost to my theory is that year to date, Taiwan, which exports in part through China, is also in the funk: export, GDP growth, you name it.
But China can not depreciate renminbi against dollar, for doing this will anger US, which perennially incurs huge trade deficits with China.
(c) Tom Orlik, What the ‘Unofficial’ Numbers Say About China’s Economy. China Real Time Report, Feb 22, 2013 http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealti ... out-chinas-economy/
("The official data shows resurgent exports coming into 2013, with 14% year-on-year growth in December. But a growing discrepancy between data on China’s exports to Hong Kong and Hong Kong’s imports from China, suggest that might be an exaggeration. Louis Kuijs, China economist at RBS, says that export growth could be overstated by as much as 4 percentage points")