China’s Economy Rebounds After Three Years of Zero-Covid Isolation
Retail sales, a key gauge of China’s consumption and a major growth engine of China’s economic recovery, have rebounded. Photo: Liu Dawei/Zuma Press Bingyan Wang April 17, 2023 10:05 pm ET SINGAPORE—China’s economy accelerated in the first three months of the year, pointing toward a robust recovery from three years of strict pandemic policies that had held back the world’s second-largest economy. China’s gross domestic product expanded by 4.5% in the first quarter of the year compared with the year earlier, the country’s National Bureau of Statistics said Tuesday, as the lifting of three years of tough Covid-19 controls and Beijing’s supportive policies helped to rekindle growth. The result topped the 4.0% expansion predicted by economists polled by The Wall Street Journal and marked an acceleration from the 2.9% year-over-ye
Retail sales, a key gauge of China’s consumption and a major growth engine of China’s economic recovery, have rebounded.
Photo: Liu Dawei/Zuma Press
Bingyan Wang
SINGAPORE—China’s economy accelerated in the first three months of the year, pointing toward a robust recovery from three years of strict pandemic policies that had held back the world’s second-largest economy.
China’s gross domestic product expanded by 4.5% in the first quarter of the year compared with the year earlier, the country’s National Bureau of Statistics said Tuesday, as the lifting of three years of tough Covid-19 controls and Beijing’s supportive policies helped to rekindle growth.
The result topped the 4.0% expansion predicted by economists polled by The Wall Street Journal and marked an acceleration from the 2.9% year-over-year increase in the final three months of 2022—one of China’s weakest quarters in decades.
Retail sales, a key gauge of China’s consumption and a major growth engine of China’s economic recovery, rebounded by 10.6% in March from a year earlier, up from a 3.5% year-over-year increase in the first two months of the year. Surveyed economists had expected retail sales to rise 7.9% in March from a year earlier.
Factory output strengthened, too, though not as strongly as economics had forecast. Industrial output rose 3.9% in March from a year earlier, accelerating from the 2.4% increase in the January-February period from a year ago though falling short of the expected 4.1% growth pace.
China’s fixed-asset investment rose 5.1% in the first quarter of the year, expanding from the January-February period’s 5.5% growth rate, and lower than the 5.8% pace anticipated by economists.
China’s headline measure of joblessness, the urban surveyed unemployment rate, fell to 5.3% in March, from 5.6% in February.
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