China’s Economy against the background of crisis caused by the pandemic coronavirus, fell for the first time in 30 years, as evidenced by the official data on the dynamics of GDP in the first quarter of 2020, published by the National Bureau of statistics (NBS) of the PRC.
In January-March 2020 the country’s GDP dipped to 6.8 percent year-on-year, which is the first decline in quarterly statistics of the country since 1992. In the first quarter of 2019 China’s GDP growth was at 6.4%. Relative to the fourth quarter of 2019, the Chinese economy fell by 9.8 percent. In annual terms, these the beginning of 2020 was the worst in 40 years.
Industrial production in China in the first quarter fell 8.4 percent. Retail sales in China fell in January-March, up 19 percent year-on-year. Unemployment in the country, which has long remained at the level of 5 percent, in January-February was 6.2 percent, and in March fell to 5.9 percent.
Earlier edition of The Wall Street Journal predicted that the decline of China’s economy in the first quarter of the year will be 8.5 percent, Reuters believed that it will be at the level of 6.5 percent, economists Bloomberg put the figure at 6 percent.
