January 20, 2015
The NYT ran an article headlined, “China’s Economy Expands at Slowest Rate in Quarter Century.” People who read the piece discovered that China’s growth rate for 2014 was estimated at 7.4 percent, which is more than three times the growth rate projected for the United States. More strikingly, this is not much of a slowdown from the last two years.
The I.M.F. reports growth in both of these years was 7.7 percent. Measured as a share of growth, a drop from 7.7 percent to 7.4 percent in China would be equivalent to a drop from 2.0 percent to 1.92 percent in the United States. It’s not clear that this sort of slowdown would draw headlines.
There are questions about the accuracy of China’s growth data, but this article refers only to the reported numbers. These do not provide much a basis for talk of a major slowing of China’s economy.
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