China, the global superpower which has stunned the world with it’s stellar performance in the global economic downturn has recently been showing signs of aging. According to the Globe and Mail, China’s growth which was capped at 7.7 per cent in 2012 – a figure leaps and bounds beyond developed Western economies – it had forecast an 8.2 per cent growth rate in May. Chinese GDP grew 10.4 per cent in 2010 and 9.3 per cent in 2011, the World Bank said.
“China’s slowdown this year has been significant, and some fear it could still accelerate,” the World Bank wrote in its East Asia and Pacific Data Monitor. The reason for this slow down is “lacklustre recovery in the United States and recession in Europe,” according to the World Bank.
The World Bank said that with the exception of Vietnam and China, which posted only 1 per cent year-over-year in July, all of the other major economies in the region saw a decline in exports. This was, the banks said, “a sharp change from the 15-20 per cent export growth rates recorded in 2011.”
Still, a slowing China is bad news for a Canada that’s “vulnerable to a further slowdown,” as BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc. chief economist Sherry Cooper noted Friday, in comments published before the World bank forecast was issued.
In addition to risks from “an overvalued currency, tighter credit conditions and the prospect of higher interest rates,” Ms. Cooper said, “commodity demand might weaken further as growth prospects in China, India and Brazil have dimmed and Europe is still mired in austerity induced recession and debt overload.”