Economic rebound in China 'unlikely' in 2014

China's economic slowdown is nearing an end, but prospects for a rebound next year look dim amid an expected drop in the nation's GDP growth rate, a United States manufacturing industry group said.

The Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation said the outlook for China will remain "murky" as GDP growth drops to 7.1 percent in 2014 from 7.3 percent this year amid "an extended period of slower growth".

The Virginia-based group said: "While recent Chinese data have suggested a bottoming of the sharp slowdown in Asia's largest economy, there is no sense of a definitive rebound on the short-term horizon."

The comments appear in the alliance's Asian manufacturing outlook.

The report comes three weeks after China's leaders pledged to implement sweeping economic and social reforms aimed at putting the world's second-largest economy on a more stable footing.

The MAPI forecast is less rosy than the view from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which last week forecast Chinese GDP growth of 8.2 percent in 2014, up from an expected 7.7 percent this year, driven by stronger domestic demand.

The body's view also is more pessimistic than the consensus forecast of economists surveyed by Reuters. That survey saw growth slowing to 7.4 percent in 2014 from an expected 7.6 percent this year.

China's government has set a 2013 growth target of 7.5 percent.

The MAPI report said that China's economic growth stabilized in the third quarter, mainly due to "a gradual recovery in exports and public investment".

The nation's economic growth rate sagged earlier this year amid the government's effort to shift the country's economic model away from exports and investment and toward private consumption.

China's economic slowdown is expected to drag on as the country confronts a "sluggish world economy", according to the MAPI report.

Other factors seen as crimping hopes for a quick economic rebound, according to MAPI, are "increasingly difficult demographic challenges affecting labor supply" - a reference to China's effort to move some 250 million rural residents into newly built cities by 2025 - and challenges in rebalancing the economy toward personal consumption.

Industrial production growth is expected to slow to 9 percent in 2014 from 9.2 percent this year, the report said.

MAPI economist Ernie Preeg told China Daily in early November that third-quarter figures showing production in China growing faster than GDP demonstrated that the country's "grand strategy of shifting resources to personal consumption isn't happening".

Personal consumption in China represented 35 percent of GDP in the third quarter, Preeg noted. To boost personal consumption to 40 or 45 percent of GDP, "you have to have annual growth of 15 to 20 percent a year", the economist said.

China's cooling economy has begun to hurt the performance of Western companies with large stakes in the country. In the third quarter, US-based companies that reported trouble in their Chinese operations included Microsoft Corp, Danaher Corp (which makes water filters, printing equipment and medical devices) and IBM Corp.

The US-China Business Council said in its annual China business survey in October that fewer companies this year have reported profit margins in China that were superior to those of their entire global operations.

It also said that fewer companies have reported double-digit revenue increases.

Despite decelerating economic growth, China still attracts foreign investment at a rate that would be envied by other nations. The country attracted $8.38 billion of foreign direct investment in August, up 0.62 percent from a year earlier, according to the Ministry of Commerce.

In the first eight months of this year, China attracted $79.8 billion of FDI, up 6.4 percent year-on-year but still below the economy's overall growth rate.

Asia-wide, the MAPI report gives a mixed outlook, projecting a modest rise in GDP growth in developing Asia to 6.5 percent in 2014 from 6.3 percent in 2013. That would be weaker than the 6.9 percent growth seen in 2012.