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中國經濟之狀況篇 – 開欄文
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瀏覽3,556 ｜回應25｜推薦1 |
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六月底各種經濟報表公佈，指數披露。中國的經濟狀況不如預期；唱衰之聲四起，見以下本欄彭博社的報導。我只看到《雅虎財經》上摩根史坦利的預測仍然看好中國經濟前景。
世事無常，未來難測；在此將各家分析存檔備查。到了九月底和今年年底，再做個檢驗印證。或許可以看出：誰有認知偏差；誰的資料不夠周全；誰的分析解讀功力鴉鴉烏。
可參看本城市《中國經濟體系正在進行(？)結構性改革》一文，和《中國相關新聞三則》一欄下《中國經濟糟透了》一文；以及《中國經濟之計劃篇》一欄。
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2023年中國經濟年報“出爐” -- 陳琳
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2023年中國經濟年報“出爐”，GDP比上年增5.2%
新京報，記者 陳琳，編輯 唐崢，校對 王心，2024-01-17
(請參閱本欄上一篇貼文)
新京報訊(記者陳琳)1月17日，國新辦進行例行經濟資料發佈，國家統計局局長康義介紹，初步核算，2023年全年國內生產總值1,260,582億元，按不變價格計算，比上年增長 5.2%。
分產業看，第一產業增加值89,755億元，比上年增長4.1%；第二產業增加值482,589億元，增長4.7%，第三產業增加值683,238億元，增長5.8%。(卜凱：三種「產業」的「總值」共為1,255,582億元；以上本段的「增加值」可能應為「總值」。)
分季度看，一季度國內生產總值同比增長4.5%，二季度增長6.3%，三季度增長 4.9%，四季度增長5.2%。從環比看，四季度國內生產總值增長1.0%。
索引：
第一產業
第二產業
第三產業
同比增長率
環比增長率
環比和同比
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《2023年中國經濟相關報導四則》讀後
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另一論壇的老友胡承渝兄分享了四則中國經濟2023年的年終報導；轉載於此，請參考(即將陸續刊出)。這些新聞的來源是：新京報、騰訊網、北京商報、以及國是直通車。各位也可以從下面這個網頁聽取簡單總結：https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm11vWs8rQk。感謝各位作者、編者、和新聞機構；並為我的侵權行為致歉。
我雖然不是經貿專業人員，但也看過財報，讀過幾本經濟學教科書和經典著作；略誌數語於此。
首先，我曾說：「我年近80，自然不會天真到要求或期盼中國共產黨自動放棄『一黨專政』…」；同理，我也「不會天真到」全然接受任何「官方統計數字」。我轉載這四篇報導/分析的原因有兩個：
1) 自從去年十月後(第三季結束，第四季開始)，我很少讀到唱衰中國經濟的文章；到目前為止，在美國媒體上也沒有看到太多的相關數據。從而，我當時就推論：中國經濟在第三季已經逐漸回穩。中國國家統計局發表的2023年報很可能灌了10 – 20%的水，但它們大概在「官方統計」標準作業程序所容許「誤差範圍」之內。也就是說，這四篇報導呈現的數據，即使說不上八、九不離十，也應該「準確」到讓章家敦之流的中國觀察家們沒有說嘴的餘地。
2) 林毅夫博士最近駁斥了中國發展悲觀論。以他的身份和地位，應該不願意為了做個啦啦隊員而站出來大呼小叫。換句話說，如果沒有充分「底氣」和確實依據，林博士不會發表他那篇大作。這是我相信《中國2023經濟年報》的數據有相當「可信度」的第二個原因。
其次，我在本欄《開欄文》中說過：
「世事無常，未來難測；在此將各家分析存檔備查。到了九月底和今年年底，再做個檢驗印證。或許可以看出：誰有認知偏差；誰的資料不夠周全；誰的分析解讀功力鴉鴉烏。」
如果我以上關於「可信度」的推斷站得住腳，去年四月初以後九月底以前，一拖拉庫唱衰中國經濟的專家學者們就該打臉了。
最後，我也不得不對我就此議題發表過的評論，拍拍自己後背；鼓勵、鼓勵，沾沾自許一番。
以下的這些報導請和林毅夫博士大作，以及本城市過去發表/轉載過的相關文章對照來看。
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英國中國商會：中國經濟並無「系統性麻煩」-Nasreen Seria
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此外，針對美國商務部長相關談話，歐盟中國商會主席表示：「我們不會用『不適於投資』一詞來形容中國現況。」
China’s Economy Not in ‘Systemic Trouble,’ British Chamber Says
Nasreen Seria, 08/30/023
(Bloomberg) -- China’s economy isn’t as bad as the prevailing mood suggests and growth is moving in the right direction as consumer spending picks up, according to an official at the British Chamber of Commerce in China.
While the recovery has slowed, “I don’t actually buy the notion that the Chinese economy is in serious systemic trouble,” Chris Torrens, vice chairman of the chamber, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television.
The economy is performing as would be expected in the year after Covid restrictions were lifted, he said, noting that consumer spending on services has picked up.
“Sitting here in Beijing and traveling around China, I’m seeing more consumer spend,” he said. “We feel things are going in the right direction.”
Economists have been downgrading their growth forecasts for China into next year as latest data showed a worsening in the property market, slower consumer and manufacturing growth, and a slump in private investment.
Gross domestic product will likely expand 5.1% this year, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg, in line with the government’s target of around 5%.
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.
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中國經濟雪上加霜習總左支右絀 -- 彭博社
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China’s Economic Woes Are Multiplying — and Xi Jinping Has No Easy Fix
Bloomberg News, 06/30/23
(Bloomberg) -- It was meant to be the year China’s economy, unshackled from the world’s strictest Covid-19 controls, roared back to help power global growth.
Instead, halfway through 2023, it’s facing a confluence of problems: Sluggish consumer spending, a crisis-ridden property market, flagging exports, record youth unemployment and towering local government debt. The impact of these strains is starting to reverberate around the globe, impacting everything from commodity prices to equity markets. The risk of Fed hikes tipping the US into recession has also heightened the prospect of a simultaneous slump in the world's two economic powerhouses.
What's worse, President Xi Jinping’s government doesn’t have great options to fix things. Beijing’s typical playbook of using large-scale stimulus to boost demand has led to massive oversupply in property and industry, and surging debt levels among local governments. That’s sparked a discussion about whether China is headed for a Japan-style malaise after 30 years of unprecedented economic growth.
Exacerbating this is Xi’s more assertive approach to dealing with the US, which has added fuel to American efforts to cut China off from supplies of advanced semiconductors and other technologies set to drive economic growth in the future.
Altogether, the dynamics threaten not only to lead to disappointing growth this year, but also to thwart the Chinese economy’s momentum to surpass that of the US.
“A few years ago, it was difficult to imagine China not rapidly overtaking the US as the world's biggest economy,” said Tom Orlik, chief economist for Bloomberg Economics. “Now, that geopolitical moment will almost certainly be delayed, and it's possible to imagine scenarios where it doesn't happen at all.”
In a downside scenario — with a sharper property slump, slow pace of reforms and more dramatic US-China decoupling — Bloomberg Economics sees China’s growth decelerating to 3% by 2030.
Base Effect
China’s $18 trillion economy is struggling across a range of sectors. In the debt-strapped southwestern province of Guizhou, officials are seeking bailouts from Beijing. In the manufacturing hub of Yiwu in coastal Zhejiang province, small businesses say sales are down substantially from 2021 levels. Over in the city of Hangzhou, the home of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., a government regulatory crackdown on the tech sector and tens of thousands of layoffs are now affecting the property market.
China’s official growth target of around 5%, which was deemed unambitious when it was announced in March, now looks more realistic. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in June cut its forecast for China’s growth this year to 5.4% from 6%.
At first sight, in a world economy expected to grow a meager 2.8%, that doesn't look too shabby. The reality, though, is that with China still under Covid rules in 2022, a low base for comparison is flattering the headline. Netting out the base effect, growth for 2023 will look closer to 3% — less than half the pre-pandemic average, Bloomberg Economics said.
If the government continues to sit on its hands, things could get worse. In a scenario where property construction crumbles, reduced land sales hit government spending, a US recession weakens global demand and China's markets shift to risk-off mode, Bloomberg's SHOK model shows another 1.2 percentage points shaved off growth.
“We’re caught in a kind of vicious circle in the sense that you need a massive stimulus to create a little moderate impact," said Keyu Jin, an economics professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science who wrote The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism.
“We have to be prepared for slower growth in the future because China is really in transition right now from industrialization to innovation-based growth," she said. "Innovation-based growth is just not that fast.”
To be sure, China's policymakers have defied the doomsayers before and could do so again. A bigger-than-expected stimulus, proactive moves to resolve bad debts, a commitment to support entrepreneurs and extending an olive branch to the US could dispel some of the pessimism.
But for now, the lack of substantial stimulus or real reform is frustrating investors. The 12% rally enjoyed by the MSCI China Index in January proved a false dawn as the gauge steadily gave back all the year’s gains. It’s now down about 6% in 2023 and Wall Street’s biggest banks are cutting forecasts to levels that suggest it will struggle to reclaim the levels seen earlier this year.
The yuan’s CFETS basket has fallen every week since late April, a losing streak unmatched since the China Foreign Exchange Trade System started compiling the data in 2015 — and enough to see the People’s Bank of China step in to prop up the currency.
Confidence Trap
At the start of 2023, optimism was high that China would see a rapid recovery in consumer spending, fueled by revenge shopping, eating out and travel. But anxiety about what weaker growth means for unemployment and incomes, combined with the negative wealth effect from a slumping property sector, has prompted people to save rather than spend.
Xiao Jin was one of the people hoping the abrupt end in December of three years of Covid Zero would mean shoppers would flock back to her toy shop in Zunyi, a city in Guizhou.
“We barely made any money in the last three years,” Xiao, a mother of two children, said outside her shop in mid-June. But “business is even worse than last year.”
At the heart of wilting consumer sentiment is the property market. The slump followed the government's attempt to crack down on heavily indebted real estate developers in 2020 to reduce risk. That pushed housing prices down and a number of the weaker companies defaulted. Many developers stopped building houses they had already sold but hadn’t yet delivered, prompting some home owners to stop paying their mortgages.
This turbulence was a wake up call for many Chinese, who have long considered property a sure-bet investment and used it as a store of wealth.
And there’s no indication the fall in property prices is attracting the new buyers needed to kickstart a rebound. Banks advanced the smallest amount of longer-term loans to households last year in almost a decade and borrowing was down another 13% in the first five months of this year, indicating fewer people are taking out new mortgages.
Another worrying sign is youth unemployment. At 20.8%, the jobless rate for those aged 16 to 24 is the highest since China began publishing the data in 2018 and is four times the national urban rate. A big reason is the slump in services industries as a result of strict Covid rules and the decline in the property market. The tech crackdown also took away a lucrative career path for many young, ambitious graduates.
At a recent job fair in Beijing, Wu Yuanhao, 27, said he’s looking for a position in the e-commerce industry, but firms are cutting staff and pay is about 20% lower than three years ago, when he last looked for a job.
“The job searching prospects are not as good as before,” he said. “The competition is in fact very fierce.”
Exports Weaken
It’s not only domestic demand that’s disappointed. Foreign trade had been a consistent support during the pandemic as Chinese factories rushed to fill US and European orders, but it’s dwindled in recent months. Since peaking at a record $340 billion in December 2021, exports in May were down almost $60 billion and are set to continue dropping as rising interest rates weigh on growth in the US and Europe.
In Yiwu, Huang Meijuan has been selling artificial Christmas trees all over the world for more than 20 years. This year she expects sales to drop 30% from 2022’s record.
“In the past two years, customers actually placed big-value orders online as the international market was strong,” said Huang. “Now the customers are back, but they are checking around to compare prices and coming back to bargain hard.”
Fading growth momentum is contributing to China’s consumer inflation staying at close to zero. Factory gate prices have already tipped into deflation — leaving businesses with less income to repay their debts.
That economic weakness has forced Beijing to shift gears. The central bank cut interest rates in June and the State Council, China’s cabinet, said it’s discussing new support measures for the economy. Possible options include a further easing in property restrictions, tax breaks for consumers, more infrastructure investment and incentives for manufacturers, especially in the high-tech sector.
Still, property and infrastructure stimulus will probably be “targeted and moderate” given the shrinking population, elevated debt levels and Xi’s call for curbing property speculation, Goldman Sachs analysts in China wrote in mid-June.
Hidden Debts
The reason that large infrastructure-led stimulus isn’t viable anymore is clear if you walk around Zunyi or travel out of the city into the countryside. While the impoverished and mountainous province of Guizhou did need some investment, it's now awash in expensive bridges, tunnels, roads and airports. And it’s struggling to pay back the debt it took on to finance all that construction, forcing it to make pleas to Beijing about its severe debt crunch.
Zunyi, a city of 6.6 million people, is served by two different airports about an hour from the downtown. Three hours away by car, there’s another airport in the city of Liupanshui. It opened in 2014 at a cost of 1.5 billion yuan ($208 million), but the airport now has few commercial flights. On a recent visit, on a day when there were no scheduled flights, the only people in the terminal were a security guard, a few cleaners and some attendants in deserted shops who were eating lunch.
Much of the funding for these projects, and others around the country, came from local government financing vehicles — companies created by municipalities to borrow on behalf of cities, towns and provinces — with that debt not appearing on their balance sheets.
It’s this “hidden debt” that’s become a major risk for China’s local governments and a big worry for investors who have bought bonds sold by the local government financing vehicles. The International Monetary Fund estimated in February that nationwide there was 66 trillion yuan of this debt at the end of 2022, up from 40 trillion yuan in 2019, with that quick increase underscoring how local governments ramped up off-book borrowing and spending during the pandemic.
Local governments are themselves under financing pressure. They had come to rely on land sales to property developers to top up their coffers, but that source of revenue is drying up due to the housing downturn.
With the central bank now starting to cut rates, and cities across the country lowering the down-payment requirements and removing restrictions on buying multiple properties, the lackluster state of the property market might gradually change. But massive oversupply means it will take a while for any property stimulus to flow through to actual housing construction, if it does at all.
Back in Hangzhou, home prices in some neighborhoods are down almost 30% from a peak in late 2021, according to multiple real estate agents. The slump is an abrupt change for the affluent city that served as host to the Group of 20 summit back in 2016. At the time, Xi said it showcased “what has been achieved in the great course of reform and opening-up China has embarked upon.”
“I’ve never seen such a fast decline in such a short period of time in Hangzhou,” said an agent surnamed Gao who has worked in the industry in the city for almost a decade, asking to be identified by her last name because she wasn’t authorized to speak publicly. “It’s completely a buyer’s market now.”
Wang, the wife of an Alibaba employee, listed one of the couple’s two apartments in the city for sale in early June after a round of job cuts at the tech giant.
“For the first time, the layoff news made me rethink whether the mortgages we’ve undertaken are too high,” said Wang, who asked to be identified by her surname only because she was talking about a private matter. “It might be time to prepare for darker times ahead.”
--With assistance from Yujing Liu.
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.
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中國經濟成長下半年可望回升 – 雅虎財經
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卡彭特博士看好中國經濟成長走勢的根據在於：
1) 中國國內消費者的支出趨勢；以及
2) 國內消費者花費在服務業的額度。
他並指出：由於這兩項的花費不會明顯的反映在國際市場，投資者可能對中國經濟下半年度的成長仍然感到失望。
相信以上的簡單說明可以幫助大家了解何以卡彭特博士「獨具慧眼」。不過，如開欄文所說，卡彭特博士是獨具慧眼還是跌破眼鏡，要到九月底或今年年底才能知分曉。
或許因為他是在普林斯頓拿的經濟學博士學位，下文中有有兩個英文字我要上網查字典才看得懂他的意思。
索引：
beta (請見該詞條解釋5)
secular (請見該詞條解釋1a及3)
China's recovery intact despite Q2 hiccup: Morgan Stanley
Yahoo Finance, 06/30/23
China's economic recovery slows down as the country reported disappointing factory data for the third-consecutive month in June. Despite those numbers, Morgan Stanley forecasts a rise in China's GDP growth by 6% in the second half of 2023. Seth Carpenter, Morgan Stanley's Chief Global Economist explains his outlook in an interview with Yahoo Finance Live.
Video Transcript
- China's economic recovery, that continues to stumble here as the world's second largest economy reported, disappointing factory data for the third consecutive month in June. The manufacturing purchasers -- Purchasing Managers' Index rather or PMI that inched up to 49 that was from 48.8 in May but remains below the 50-point mark, keeping; it in contraction territory. Meanwhile, non-manufacturing PMI fell, indicating a slowdown in services activity and construction.
China's GDP grew rapidly in the first quarter, but data from Q2 has not kept up with that initial pop. Still, Morgan Stanley forecasts a pickup in the nation's economy with growth, rising to 6% in the second half let's bring back in Seth Carpenter, Morgan Stanley Chief Global Economist. Seth, what would be the catalyst for some of that pickup in the second half?
SETH CARPENTER: Yeah, I think right now, there are two key factors for us to get that stronger second half growth. The first one is that the resurgence in consumer spending after having had such tight COVID lockdowns for so long. We saw that big pop in Q1 and moderated in Q2, but we think there's more to go there with consumers satisfying their pent up demand, especially for domestic spending, especially on services. The second one though is, as you noted, we're getting a whole string of soft data now in Q2, especially from the manufacturing sector, if you will, the sort of old China economy sector.
And we're looking for more policy stimulus to come out of Beijing. We've seen some relaxation of the restraint to the housing market. We've seen some easing from the central bank. We have seen-- and we think we're just going to see incrementally more policy stimulus coming out of Beijing to really shore up those parts of the economy that are foundering.
- You know Seth, as you guys point out in your note discussing a rebound in China, you also point out that there's a hot debate over whether it is indeed going to see this kind of reacceleration. Like we talk about the debates here all the time. It sounds like that one is equally, if not more heated, what do you think is the crux of investor confusion when they look at China and whether indeed we are going to see this reacceleration?
SETH CARPENTER: So I think there are a few contributing factors there to the overall market versus. The first one is just the plain facts. Q2 is very soft in China-- has been very soft in China. And there are no two ways about that. So that's not a topic of debate and anyone can see that fact to the data. I think on top of that however, there is also a lot of investors had plays on China, especially in the first quarter, looking for that China reopening trade.
People have said over the past 25 years, we've seen periods where China accelerates, let's try to capitalize on that. Our view has been, it'll be a very different cycle. And it has been a very different cycle. So much more focused on domestic spending and on services that most investors typical China plays didn't work out. And I think that compounds the bearishness. And I think the last part is, unquestionably, once we get beyond this year and next year where there's a cyclical strength to it, there is a secular longer term slowdown in China.
And I think a lot of people in the markets now are saying, maybe the slowdown that we're seeing now is actually that structural slowdown and that exacerbates the bearishness for the near term.
- In some of the behavioral shifts behind the slowdown in services, where is that kind of leading into other product categories among consumers right now? Are there areas that are kind of jumping or sticking out or outperforming?
SETH CARPENTER: Yeah. I mean, we do think the focus really should be on services spending in the Chinese economy. And that fact, more spending on services than historically has been the case out of spending, that helps to explain why there is less of a spillover to the rest of the world or the Chinese acceleration in the first quarter of the year. And we also think, even if we are right, and we get this acceleration in the second half of the year, investors may be once again disappointed because that spillover, those betas to the rest of the world are just not going to be anywhere near the size that people are used to.
- Seth, great to see you. Thank you so much. Happy holiday weekend to you. Seth Carpenter, Morgan Stanley Chief Global Economist. Appreciate it.
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