Selasa, 15 Juli 2014

China’s G.D.P. Expands, but Businesses Aren’t Feeling the Effect

By KEITH BRADSHER July 16, 2014

HONG KONG — Millions of Chinese businesspeople like Ou Chengbi are seeing scant signs of recovery in their country's economy, even as data released Wednesday morning suggests growth is stabilizing.

Ms. Ou, a butcher at an open-air market on the outskirts of Guangzhou in southeastern China, dripped perspiration near the unrefrigerated slabs of beef in her stall as she described how as recently as last winter, she could still chop up an entire cow each day and sell it all.

"Now I can only sell half a cow a day," she said.

The National Bureau of Statistics in Beijing said Wednesday that growth in gross domestic product edged up in the second quarter to 7.5 percent compared with a year ago. But independent surveys of businesses across China show that in sector after sector, sales and confidence are still deteriorating.

"All of them are pointing in the opposite direction from this supposed G.D.P. number," said Leland Miller, the president of China Beige Book International, a New York data service that surveys 2,200 private businesses across China each quarter to gauge economic activity.

Three of the four cylinders of the Chinese economy — exports, private sector construction and retail sales — are sputtering. But the fourth, government investment and spending, is running strong, propelled by redoubled lending this spring by the state-controlled banking system to the national railroad system, local governments and state-owned enterprises.

The result has been frenzied spending on the construction of new railroad lines — up 32.1 percent in June from a year earlier — and subsidized housing. Steel output in China is setting records by tonnage as a result, even as the number of housing starts in the private sector falls steeply.

Total lending has now risen faster than economic output, even before adjusting for inflation, in every quarter since late 2011. Lending accelerated further in June, according to figures released on Tuesday by the People's Bank of China. Yet Mr. Miller's survey and others show that private businesses are becoming less and less interested in borrowing money because they see few opportunities to invest it profitably.

"Generally speaking, comparing recent months to the same period last year, business has been very slow and very quiet," said Kay Lam, the manager of UB Office Systems, an office furniture store in Guangzhou.

Chinese officials have repeatedly called for rebalancing the economy: encouraging more spending by households, which save nearly half their incomes, and less dependence on debt-financed investment projects. But each time growth starts to fall below the official target of roughly 7.5 percent — as it did in the first quarter, when it was 7.4 percent — the government quickly opens the spigots for further credit.

Some economists inside and outside the government say China has a choice: slow down lending and accept steady declines in economic growth each year, or continue heavy lending and risk a sharp drop in economic growth someday when the financial system begins to teeter. But nobody knows when that might happen.

"Although there is no way to predict with accuracy and certainty the point at which China will reach the limits of its debt capacity, I believe that current rates of credit expansion can continue at most for another 3-4 years," Michael Pettis, a finance professor at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management, wrote in his newsletter after the release of the economic data.

Yet China's economic outlook retains pockets of long-term strength. One of them is that tens of millions of Chinese workers have more money each year to spend. The data Wednesday showed that average wages for migrant workers were up another 10.6 percent this summer from a year ago, nearly five times the increase in consumer prices over the past year, at just 2.3 percent.

Migrants, often with less than a high school degree, have fared better than more educated young people in China's job market in recent years, however, as a quintupling in the number of college graduates has produced a glut in a country still heavily reliant on blue-collar sectors like construction and manufacturing.

Retail sales are growing strongly, up 12.4 percent in June from a year earlier, according to the government figures released Wednesday, nearly matching a pace of 12.5 percent in May. But that has not been fast enough to offset the deceleration in private sector investment as housing prices deflate.

Hilda Wang contributed reporting.


source : http://rss.nytimes.com/c/34625/f/640316/s/3c8af2f4/sc/24/l/0L0Snytimes0N0C20A140C0A70C170Cbusiness0Cinternational0Cchinas0Egdp0Eexpands0Ebut0Ebusinesses0Earent0Efeeling0Ethe0Eeffect0Bhtml0Dpartner0Frss0Gemc0Frss/story01.htm

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