BEIJING: China’s economy has shown signs of improvement in the first two months of the year with little risk of a hard landing, senior Chinese officials said. China’s macroeconomy stabilised in the beginning of 2017, Ning Jizhe, head of the National Bureau of Statistics, said at the sidelines of the annual legislature meeting in Beijing yesterday. Industrial output in January and February grew more than 6%, and the services sector expanded over 8%, he said. In combination with rising retail sales and fixed asset investment data, “these readings would suggest robust growth momentum continued in early 2017”, Bloomberg Intelligence chief Asia economist Tom Orlik wrote in a recent note.
Ning’s remarks indicated that policy makers in the world’s second-largest economy are more upbeat as they set a 2017 growth target of about 6.5%. Premier Li Keqiang had earlier warned of “graver” internal and external challenges in his work report to the gathering of the National People’s Congress, while stressing economic fundamentals remained sound and systemic risk was under control. Domestic demand had been robust and the market expectation on China’s economy had improved, the statistics chief said. He reiterated the government’s determination to root out fake data, saying 15 cases of statistics fraud in nine provinces last year had been probed.
