By Chioma Gabriel

Chinese Consul General in Nigeria, Chao Xiaoliang said yesterday that China’s economy is better than expected, based on a recent release by Chinese State Statistics Bureau of the latest macroeconomic statistics for 2016.

Chao Xiaoliang stated that  in the first three quarters of the year, the GDP of China reached 7.91 trillion USD growing by 6.7% at comparable prices compared with a year earlier and contributing to a quarter of world economic growth.

“Chinese Economy is making progress while maintaining stability and quality, which is better than expected. It is not easy to achieve 6.7% growth on a base as high as 10 trillion USD (GDP of China in 2015), and the increment from 6.7% growth is 800 billion, even higher than that from the double-digit growth before and equal to the size of a middle-income country’s overall economy.

“Q3, China’s GDP achieved 6.7%  on year growth, flat with that in the Q1 and Q2. To be specific, more remarkably steady progress is seen in the industrial sector, which grew 6.0 percent year-on-year and 6.1 percent in Q3 this year. The volume of industrial consumption and output of electricity and freight traffic has seen rapid growth since the beginning of the third quarter of this year. The industrial sector has clearly tended to stabilize.

”The range of decline in Producer Price Index(PPI) has narrowed. In September, the PPI ended its 54 months’ trend of declining and grew by 0.1%, which signifies the substantial changes of the demand and supply in industry sector. In the first three quarters, the growth rate of the total imports and exports volume has increasingly stabilized, quarter after quarter, and in third quarter returned to positive growth.

Coping effectively with pressure of economic downturn and complex domestic and international situation, China maintained its strong support of the growth of world economy.

“Much headway has been made concerning the five major tasks, which are cutting industrial overcapacity, destocking, de-leveraging, lowering costs and improving weak links. In the first three quarters, the output of raw coal dropped by 10.5 percent year-on-year. At the end of August, the finished goods inventory of industrial enterprises above designated size dropped for five consecutive months.

At the end of September, the area of housing waiting for sale kept decreasing for seven consecutive months. The debt ratio and cost of industrial enterprises both dropped. Investment in ecology conservation and environmental protection, agriculture, forestry, water resource and infrastructures maintained a rapid growth. Meanwhile, the need structure continued to upgrade.”

Xiaoliang also disclosed that added value of the service industry in the first three quarters accounts for 52.8 percent of GDP, up 1.6 percent points compared to the same period last year.