Economists say they remain optimistic about China's growth prospects and believe the Chinese economy will still be the driving force for global growth as the World Economic Forum (WEF)'s 15th Annual Meeting of the New Champions came to a close in Dalian of northeast China's Liaoning Province on Thursday.
Also known as the Summer Davos, the three-day event gathered some 1,600 leading figures from the public and private sectors across nearly 80 countries and regions to jointly explore new drivers and pathways for global economic growth.
In interviews with the China Global Television Network (CGTN) on Thursday, scholars and economists attending the event from around the world shared their views on the current global economic outlook.
Adam Tooze, director of the European Institute at Columbia University, said he is positive about China's economy in the short term, noting there is still strong international demand for Chinese exports.
"People clearly want high-quality, low-cost Chinese goods, and as China moves up the value chain, they're not going to become less attractive. They're going to become more attractive, and so I don't think anything changes about that model. I think the progressive shift out of real estate towards manufacturing keeps on, and that's very, very optimistic," he said.
Last year, China 's gross domestic product (GDP) exceeded its annual growth target by expanding 5.2 percent to reach more than 126 trillion yuan (over 17.7 trillion U.S. dollars), according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics.
Lourdes Casanova, a senior lecturer and director of the Emerging Markets Institute under Cornell University, said this figure is still impressive as China is continuing to add sizable value to its GDP each year.
"China has now the second biggest economy in the world with (over) 17 trillion (U.S. dollars of GDP). We have never seen in the history of economics in the world, a country of that size to grow five percent. So China, with the growth in size, has to be used to less growth, in terms of the [past] ten percent growth, is impossible, you cannot grow that much. Still you look at five percent, it's like the size of Australia. So like China is adding an 'Australian economy' every year, which is tremendous," she said.
According to the Chief Economists Outlook released by the World Economic Forum (WEF), more than half of the experts surveyed expected the global economy to weaken in 2024 as it would be impeded by factors such as debt crises, high inflation and interest rates, and sluggish trade performance.
However, despite these concerns, Attilio Di Battista, author of the WEF's Future of Growth Report, said that leading economists still remain bullish China's economic outlook.
"There is still a lot of positivity about the prospects of growth here in the country. So 80 percent of them say that they expect for 2024 moderate to strong growth, still also with low inflation, so actually lower than in most other countries. So from that perspective, it's still a very positive outlook. We also see that the role that the Chinese economy is going play is still that of a driving force for global growth. Of course other parts of the world are growing slower, it also depends. But here there is also probably with lower inflation, a higher expectation of the government being able to step in and provide more support to the economy in the next year. So there is also that expectation from our outlook," he said.
Int'l economists optimistic about China's growth prospects as Summer Davos concludes
