China’s decision to ease rules on travel in and out of the country, the world’s second-largest economy, has offered investors hope that it could soften the toll from higher interest rates on global stock markets and unblock supply chains amid a dark outlook for 2023. Chinese authorities said late on Monday that inbound travellers would not have to quarantine on arrival, from 8 January onward. The announcement marked the latest in a series of steps to reopen the country, which is home to vital global supply chains and 1.4 billion…
Tag: Economics
The pendulum swung against globalisation in 2022 – and that’s no bad thing | Larry Elliott
This was supposed to be the year when things returned to normal. After the collapse of activity during the months of lockdown in 2020 and the supply bottlenecks of 2021, the hope was that 2022 would call time on an era of seemingly permanent crisis. It hasn’t quite turned out like that. Indeed, 2022 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for the global economy, taking its place alongside the end of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system in 1971, the reunification of Germany in 1990 and the…
China’s screeching U-turn on Covid will not be an instant fix
From zero tolerance to “let it rip”. China has not just changed its mind on how to cope with Covid, it has executed the mother of all U-turns in response to slower growth and mounting civil unrest at the draconian lockdowns. If Beijing is expecting an immediate economic boost from abandoning its tough controls it is mistaken. There will be a growth dividend from the policy shift but the state of the world’s second biggest economy will get worse before it gets better, and it will be next spring at…
Economists hail end to zero Covid in China but huge human toll is feared
Beijing’s abrupt dismantling of zero-Covid controls has been welcomed by economists, even as the country braces itself for the human impact of letting the disease spread through a vulnerable population. The leadership’s abrupt U-turn on how it handles the pandemic appears to have been triggered by protests against controls that began last month, a nationwide show of discontent on a scale China had not seen in decades. But that unrest came after growing concern about the toll that isolation and regular harsh lockdowns were having on the country’s economy. China…
Without effective vaccines, China’s economy may not heal
China’s nearly three-year policy of enacting strict lockdowns to contain outbreaks of Covid-19 came with a heavy price for the world’s second largest economy. The question for its president, Xi Jinping, and his inner court of advisers is whether a sudden relaxation of lockdown rules brought in this week will both prevent a recurrence of the shockwave of protests across the country and turn the economy around. In the couple of days after Beijing’s announced relaxations to the rules – including allowing people with mild or no symptoms to quarantine…
Markets optimistic as China eases Covid rules, but experts warn of danger ahead
Global shares and the price of some key commodities have risen on hopes that the easing of China’s strict zero-Covid measures would help to bring down inflation, even as some experts warned that the country was not prepared to live with the disease. China’s government on Wednesday announced a significant shift towards living with the virus. People with Covid-19 who have mild or no symptoms can quarantine at home, while officials have been instructed to stop launching temporary lockdowns. Testing will no longer be required for “cross-regional migrants”. China’s economic…
Zero-Covid: five charts that show how restrictions are throttling the Chinese economy
Protests against pandemic restrictions in China could unleash a new wave of volatility into a global economy already racked by inflation, energy shocks and the war in Ukraine. The government’s continued reliance on lockdowns, quarantine orders and mass testing to limit the spread of the virus has provoked the biggest protest movement in decades. But there’s little evidence that authorities are willing to diverge from the path they have taken. As well as prompting social unrest inside China, there are signs that the zero-Covid strategy is throttling the world’s second…
Covid’s still a big issue for China – and that’s trouble for global economy
For much of the world there has been hope for some time that the worst economic shocks from the Covid pandemic are in the rearview mirror. In China, however, there are important reminders that risks to the world economy still remain. Three years since the virus first spread, protests in several Chinese cities against the Beijing government’s strict zero-Covid policies have reignited concerns in financial markets over the economic costs of the pandemic. Global oil prices have fallen back, while the Chinese yuan and stock markets across Asia have taken…
China economy grows faster than expected, but falls short of targets as risks loom
China’s economy expanded faster than economists expected in the September quarter but the poor performance of the nation’s property market and weak retail and import data underscored the nation’s ongoing growth challenges. China, the world’s second-largest economy, posted a 3.9% increase in gross domestic product in the July-September period from a year earlier, the national bureau of statistics said. The GDP figures, delayed a week to avoid clashing with the key Communist party Congress that granted Xi Jinping an unprecedented third term as leader, beat forecasts of about 3.2-3.3% growth.…
India is quietly laying claim to economic superpower status
The rise of China has been the biggest story in the global economy in recent decades. But amid concern about its stumbling property market and global fears about inflation, the emergence of its neighbour, India, as a potential new economic superpower may be going under the radar. You won’t find mention of it in Liz Truss’s blueprint for a “modern brilliant Britain”, but the UK has just been overtaken by India as the world’s fifth biggest economy. The nation of 1.4 billion people is on track to move into third…