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QINGDAO TODAY
在线翻译:
szdaily -> Business -> 
Many provinces cut growth targets
    2020-01-23  08:53    Shenzhen Daily

ABOUT two-thirds of China’s provinces, regions and municipalities have cut their 2020 growth targets from last year, despite easing trade tensions with the United States.

The lower regional targets reinforce expectations of a further slowdown in the world’s second-largest economy, after gross domestic product (GDP) expanded at its slowest pace in nearly three decades in 2019, weighed down by weak domestic and global demand.

Of China’s provincial-level regions, 22 including Beijing, Guangdong, Zhejiang, Henan, Hainan, and Fujian, set lower growth targets this year compared with last, a similar number to last year.

Beijing, Shanghai and the southern export hub of Guangdong all dropped their targets from 6-6.5 percent growth to around 6 percent in 2020, in line with the expected change to the national target.

At least 11 provincial-level regions missed their 2019 GDP targets, according to preliminary statistics released by local governments.

Targets for 2020 ranged from around 5 percent growth, for the northeastern province of Heilongjiang and the northern city of Tianjin, to around 9 percent growth for the Tibet Autonomous Region.

Policy sources have said that China plans to set a lower national growth target of around 6 percent this year from last year’s 6-6.5 percent, relying on increased infrastructure spending to ward off a sharper slowdown.

Key national targets are due to be announced in March. Growth cooled to 6.1 percent in 2019, the weakest in nearly 30 years, and analysts polled expect it will cool to 5.9 percent this year even with additional stimulus measures.

The United States and China signed a phase one deal earlier in January, marking a significant de-escalation but not an end to a dispute that has threatened to derail global economic growth. Many of the tit-for-tat tariffs the two sides imposed remain in place.

China has said it will unify the way it calculates provincial economic output from early 2020, but it remains unclear how this will affect growth figures.

So far, six provincial-level regions, largely in northern China, have kept their targets the same as last year. Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Hebei, Jilin and Chongqing have all set targets that match 2019’s, of between 5 percent and 6.5 percent growth.

Just one region, Tianjin, raised its growth target. Si- chuan and Yunnan have yet to release their targets.

“Much of the national slowdown last year was driven by exports which will have weighed on the south and east more,” said Julian Evans-Pritchard, senior China economist at Capital Economics.

“Heavy industry turned out to be quite resilient last year thanks to a pick-up in property construction and so the northern provinces may not have seen growth slow as much, hence the unchanged targets,” Evans-Pritchard said.

Of the six provincial-level regions keeping growth targets steady, two missed their targets for last year — Inner Mongolia and Jilin.

Relatively richer coastal provinces are more comfortable with lower, high-quality growth, but less-developed northern and northeastern ones are less so, said Louis Kuijs, head of Asia economics at Oxford Economics.

Targets are “more about ambitions, rather than forecasts, and about how important growth is compared with other considerations,” said Kuijs.

(SD-Agencies)

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