China reports a year-on-year GDP growth rate of 6% for Q3 2019, the slowest since Q1 of 1992,
The country’s growth target for the year is in the 6%-6.5% range. As China reported 6.4% of growth in Q1 and 6.2% in Q2, it has to achieve at least 5.4% in the next quarter to meets the lowest target of 6%.
Improvements in September data
While the quarter’s growth slows, China’s retail sales went up 7.8% year-on-year in September, faster than the 7.5% in August.
Industrial output also rose 5.8% in the month, accelerating from a 4.4% rise in the previous month and beating market consensus of 5%.
However, private sector fixed-asset investment—accounting for 60% of the country’s total investment—grew 4.7% in January-September period, down from 4.9% in January-August.
Efforts to support growth
In a briefing after the GDP data release, Mao Shengyong, a spokesman for China’s statistics bureau, said the country has planned to bring forward some 2020 special local government bond issuance to this year to support regional infrastructure investment.
He added that there was ample room to change monetary policy, as rising consumer inflation has been mainly driven by volatile food prices.
While various analysts attribute China’s economic slowdown to its trade war with the US, IMF said it estimates the trade tension will cumulatively reduce the level of global GDP by 0.8% by 2020.
Beijing has relied on a mix of fiscal stimulus and monetary easing to mitigate the current slowdown, including trillions of yuan in tax cuts and the issuance of local government bonds.
