'China is increasingly influencing world GDP': Jim O'Neill

LONDON -- "China is increasingly influencing world GDP" as its economy continues to grow amid the coronavirus pandemic, renowned British economist Jim O'Neill told Xinhua in a recent interview.

China's recovery from the pandemic has been "remarkable", said O'Neill, chairman of the London-based think tank Chatham House.

"As evidenced by the October monthly data, the recovery is strengthening," said O'Neill, who in 2001 coined the acronym BRIC that represents Brazil, Russia, India, and China, a bloc of emerging economies that stood to have a significant impact on the world economy in the future.

China's consumer spending continued to pick up pace in October amid the effective containment of the COVID-19 epidemic and steady economic recovery at home, Chinese official data showed Monday.

China's retail sales of consumer goods climbed 4.3 percent year-on-year to 3.86 trillion yuan ($584.5 billion) in October, the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics said Monday.

The growth picked up from the 3.3-percent gain in September after the major consumption gauge posted its first positive growth this year in August by rising 0.5 percent year on year.

China will be probably the only G20 member country that registers positive GDP growth in 2020, O'Neill said, referring to the group of 20 major economies in the world.

The former chief economist at Goldman Sachs and former commercial secretary to the British Treasury predicted that by the end of 2021, China is likely to be close to around 10 percent larger than it was at the end of 2019.

"No other G20 economy will be close to this, and indeed, sadly, many might be slightly or significantly smaller soon, unless they can deal with the pandemic better," O'Neill said.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) currently projects that China's economy will grow by 1.9 percent in 2020 and expand at 8.2 percent in 2021, along with a gradual handoff from public support to private demand as private consumption continues to strengthen.

"China is increasingly influencing world GDP, more as it gets bigger. Hopefully this will continue," O'Neill said.