Preparation starts on 13th Five-Year Plan

The mid-stage assessment for the 11th Five-Year Plan started in March 2008, the first time it invited three third-party organizations — the Development Research Center of the State Council, the Center for China Study at Tsinghua University and the World Bank — to provide assessment reports.

The mid-stage assessment will influence the direction of the next plan, according to analysts.

Lu Zhongyuan, deputy head at the Development Research Center of the State Council, a government top think tank, said the next plan should consider a structural slowdown in the medium to long term.

"But the average GDP growth rate from 2016 to 2020 can still maintain 7 percent," he said. "The growth rate is not a problem for China."

However, it is more difficult to upgrade the growth pattern and deepen structural reforms.

In 2016, the launch year of the 13th Five-Year Plan, growth in the labor force in China is expected to stop, which means the contribution made by population growth will be zero, according to Lu.

In the second quarter of this year, GDP growth in the world's second-largest economy slowed to 7.5 percent from 7.7 percent in the first quarter. The whole-year growth in 2012 was 7.8 percent.

A research note from Nomura Securities Co Ltd predicted growth will continue to slow to 7.4 percent year-on-year in the third quarter, falling to 7.2 percent in the fourth.

"The current policy easing helps to mitigate downside risks but is not strong enough to boost a sharp recovery in growth," said Zhang Zhiwei, chief economist in China with the Japanese securities company.

Qu Hongbin, chief economist in China with HSBC Holdings Plc, a British financial group, said the falling range of the potential GDP growth may have been "overstated".

"Because the labor force will stop growing in the future, it will, at the very least, drag down the potential growth rate by 0.5 percentage points," Qu said.

Qu said the current economy is running below its potential growth rate — which still remains above 8 percent.