China’s Economy at Slowest Growth; Retail Sales Support Market Recovery

China’s economic growth was seen at its slowest step in almost a year in the third quarter of 2021, with a supply chain bottlenecks, global energy bite, and also an unsteady property market that are adds pressure to the policymakers to support a fluctuating market recovery.

Data released from investing.com earlier in the day said that the GDP grew 0.2% quarter-on-quarter, against the 0.5% growth in forecasts prepared by Investing.com and the previous month’s 1.3% growth. The GDP grew 4.9% year-on-year, lower than the 5.2% growth in forecasts prepared by Investing.com and the 7.9% growth recorded in August 2021.


National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) spokesperson Fu Linghui said at a briefing on Monday said that "The domestic economic recovery is still unstable and uneven.”

The slow growth is in contrast to the country’s impressive economic recovery from COVID-19 in 2020, boosted by effective virus containment and increasing overseas demand for Chinese manufactured goods.

Oxford Economics head of Asia economics Louis Kuijs told Reuters that, "In response to the ugly growth numbers we expect in coming months, we think policymakers will take more steps to shore up growth, including ensuring ample liquidity in the interbank market, accelerating infrastructure development and relaxing some aspects of overall credit and real estate policies."


It was seen that the Retail sales grew 4.4% year-on-year in September, higher than the 3.3% in Investing.com forecasts and the previous month’s 2.5% growth. The unemployment rate was 4.9%, lower than the 5.1% recorded in August.

ING chief economist for Greater China Iris Pang told Reuters that, "Most of the negative factors are policy-driven... the economy is having a lot of pain points and these pain points are not going away soon because policies are here to stay, and therefore it will continue into 2022."