BEIJING — China’s economic growth held steady in the quarter ending in March, buoyed by investment and rapid growth in e-commerce amid mounting trade tensions with Washington.<\/p>\n
The world’s second-largest economy expanded by 6.8 per cent over a year earlier, in line with the quarter ending in December and down slightly from 2017’s full-year expansion of 6.9 per cent, data showed Tuesday. It was above the official 2018 target of “around 6.5 per cent.”<\/p>\n
Forecasters are expecting growth to cool this year as Beijing tries to rein in rising debt by tightening controls to cool a boom in real estate sales and bank lending.<\/p>\n
The ruling Communist Party is in the midst of a marathon effort to steer the country to slower, more sustainable growth based on domestic consumption and reduce reliance on trade and investment.<\/p>\n
A potential looming threat is President Donald Trump’s threat to raise duties on up to $150 billion of Chinese goods in a dispute over Beijing’s technology policy. Beijing has issued its own list of U.S. goods for possible retaliation.<\/p>\n
The country’s trade balance swung to a rare deficit in March as exports contracted 2.7 per cent. The country relies less on trade than it did a decade ago but export industries still support millions of jobs.<\/p>\n
In a positive sign for efforts to encourage consumer spending, retail sales rose 9.8 per cent, up from December’s 9.4 per cent growth, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.<\/p>\n
E-commerce sales surged 35.4 per cent, up 3.3 per cent from the previous quarter.<\/p>\n
Investment in factories, real estate and other fixed assets rose 7.5 per cent, up from 2017’s 7.2 per cent growth.<\/p>\n
Factory output rose 6.8 per cent over a year earlier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BEIJING — China’s economic growth held steady in the quarter ending in March, buoyed by investment and rapid growth in e-commerce amid mounting trade tensions with Washington. The world’s second-largest economy expanded by 6.8 per cent over a year earlier, in line with the quarter ending in December and down slightly from 2017’s full-year expansion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":578,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5641"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/578"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5641"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5644,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5641\/revisions\/5644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}