|
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) on
Tuesday projected that China's economy will grow by 8.1 percent in
2021, 0.1 percentage point below the October forecast, according to the
latest update to its World Economic Outlook (WEO). China
is one of these economies that returned back to the pre-pandemic
projected level in the fourth quarter of 2020, "well ahead of" other
major economies, IMF Chief Economist Gita Gopinath said at a virtual
press briefing Tuesday morning. "China
has been very successful in containing the pandemic and that has played
a very important role to bring back activity much more quickly,"
Gopinath said in response to a question from Xinhua. "There's
been effective policy support provided both in terms of fiscal policy
and monetary policy," said Gopinath, adding that China's exports have
also gone up in this environment. Echoing
Gopinath's remarks, Malhar Nabar, division chief at the IMF's Research
Department, told reporters that China's policy support has been "a big
driver" of its "impressive rebound" in 2020. "The
public infrastructure spending support, and also the support that was
extended to affected households and to firms, reinforced by aggressive
actions by the People's Bank of China to provide liquidity support and
ensure that credit provision remains strong," Nabar said. "Going
forward, we see a gradual handoff to private sector activity, starting
out with a pickup in private investment activity," he said. "That's in
fact already been seen in the second half of last year, and we expect
that to continue." Nabar added that
in order to secure the recovery path, it's "vitally important" for China
to ensure that rebalancing towards private consumption continues and
"perhaps even is accelerated to an extent, with efforts to strengthen
the social safety net." According to
the latest WEO update, China will grow 5.6 percent in 2022, while global
economy will expand 4.2 percent in the same year. The IMF projected global economy to grow by 5.5 percent in 2021, 0.3 percentage point above the October forecast.
| 
Related News
