From:ChinaDaily | 2021-02-18 07:14
It may be a better option for China to pay less attention to its GDP growth target this year or even set no growth target for a second consecutive year as it focuses on a high-quality development agenda, economists said on Wednesday.
One of the hottest topics surrounding key annual meetings set for March called the two sessions is whether Beijing will retain its headline GDP growth target, they said. The question may signal key changes in economic policymaking as China embarks on the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25) period, the economists added. The two sessions, the annual gatherings of the country s top legislature and political advisory body, would demonstrate to the public that China focuses on high-quality growth and not just chasing after a numerical target, said Iris Pang, chief China economist at Dutch bank ING.
Economic recovery firmly underway
China’s economy remains on a solid track to recovery as price levels picked up while corporate borrowing increased last month, experts said.
But the recovery in consumption and the services sector remained subdued in January, underlining the necessity of more structural policy support and making any sharp tightening in monetary policy unlikely, they said.
Backed by recovering domestic demand and rising commodity prices globally, the growth in China’s producer price index, which gauges factory-gate inflation, turned positive for the first time in 12 months, coming in at 0.3 percent year-on-year last month, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Wednesday.
China's economy remains on a solid track to recovery as price levels picked up while corporate borrowing increased last month, experts said on Wednesday.
When Paul Bateman, chairman of the board of J.P. Morgan Asset Management, and George Gatch, CEO and a 33-year veteran of the bank, told thousands of employees in 2018 that a crisis was coming and it was time to prepare, it seemed like unwarranted negativity.
While stocks seemed frothy after a long bull market, there weren’t any signs it would end anytime soon. But Gatch and Bateman, the former chairman of Robert Fleming Asset Management, which JPMorgan acquired in its 2000 merger with Chase Manhattan, knew a crisis wouldn’t announce itself ahead of time.
The two industry veterans had been through plenty of crises before, and they wanted to develop detailed plans for training employees particularly those who had never been through a downturn and potential marketing campaigns. JPMAM also developed centralized risk management techniques and protocols for whatever was coming next. The manager analyzed and stress tested 22 million positions every day to see how they stood up