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Data mixed on China's road to recovery

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2009-05-14 21:04

BEIJING -- With the world keeping close watch on the Chinese economy for signs of revival, the latest data are sending mixed signals and fueling concern that a recovery, if there really is one, is not on solid footing.

When gross domestic product (GDP) and exports were soaring, indicators like electricity use didn't get much attention. Now, analysts are closely examining every scrap of data. But the problem is, many statistics don't seem to be giving much insight into economic trends. Old patterns are breaking down and long-standing relationships are breaking apart.

Also, many figures for the first two months of 2009 are especially confusing, because the long Lunar New Year holiday fell in January this year, two weeks earlier than in 2008. Many statistics were only released as an aggregate figure for January and February, making it almost impossible to derive accurate year-on-year data.

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) reported this week that China's industrial output rose 7.3 percent year on year in April, at the higher end of analysts' expectations.

Signs in Power Data

But power generation fell 3.55 percent last month from a year earlier, to 274.76 billion kilowatt hours, according to the State Grid Corp. of China. Since industry consumes about 70 percent of China's power, how do economists account for a rise in industrial production accompanied by a decline in power consumption?

A breakdown of electricity use sheds a little light on the situation. Electricity consumption started declining on a year-on-year basis last October, when it fell 3.7 percent, the first drop since 1999.

That was also before the government announced a 4-trillion-yuan(US$586 billion) stimulus package in November.

Power consumption fell 4 percent to 781 billion kw/hrs in the first quarter from a year earlier. But in March, it fell 2.02 percent, a little more than half the rate of decline in October.

And not all sectors reported a power consumption drop. Consumption of agriculture and tertiary industry rose 5.12 percent and 7.41 percent year on year in the first quarter, respectively, according to the China Electricity Council (CEC). Residential use rose 9.88 percent.

But industrial use declined 8.21 percent, and with exports falling, use in the manufacturing and export hubs of Guangdong and Zhejiang provinces, was "below the national average," the CEC said.

Indeed, the latest industrial output figures for exporters also show a sharp decline last month, down 14.3 percent to 566.21 billion yuan. An export revival is evidently way off, and that's bound to delay an overall economic recovery.

Zhang Liqun, a researcher with the Development Research Center of the State Council, a government think-tank, told Xinhua that exports would continue declining in the second half but at a slower pace. Zhang said the likelihood of further deterioration in the global economy was "slim" and Chinese exporters were trying to change their product mix.

Exports fell 22.6 percent last month, the sixth monthly drop in a row. Zhang predicted that for the whole year, exports might fall about 10 percent to 15 percent.

Industrial Restructuring

He noted that when looking at the decline in industrial power use, it was important to remember that industrial upgrading was still in progress. The decline of electricity consumption by heavy industry, which accounts for 82 percent of total industrial power consumption, was the leading cause for the overall decline.

China has spent years working to scale back its smokestack industries so it can cut energy intensity by 20 percent and major emissions by 10 percent between 2006 and 2010.

China plans to eliminate 15 million kw/hrs of power provided by small coal-powered plants, as well as obsolete capacity of 10 million tonnes in the iron industry and 6 million tonnes in the steel industry this year.

The first-quarter output growth rate of the six most energy-intensive sectors (iron and steel, nonferrous metals, building materials, petrochemicals, coking and chemicals) fell 12.5 percentage points on average from a year earlier, to 2.3 percent, NBS figures showed.

Power use by those sectors also showed large declines: iron and steel (10.24 percent), chemicals (13.14 percent) and nonferrous metals (16.78 percent) in the first quarter, according to the CEC.

Meanwhile, efforts to upgrade and rebalance industry showed progress in the first quarter, with tertiary industry's weight in the economy up 1.6 percentage points and secondary industry's weight down 1.9 points.

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