Wuhan’s GDP grew by 4% in 2022, better than the country overall. Pictured here on Jan. 20, 2023, is the city’s skyline along the Yangtze River.
Hector Retamal | Afp | Getty Images
BEIJING — China’s economic recovery is off to a modest start.
Migrant workers have mostly returned to work after China’s biggest holiday of the year, and children went back to school this week.
But preliminary data indicate overall growth isn’t roaring back on all cylinders yet, despite mainland China ending its Covid controls in early December.
For example, official loan data for January showed year-on-year growth in loans to businesses, but a sharp drop in that to households.
“The mixed data send a clear message that markets should not be too bullish about growth this year,” Nomura’s chief China Economist Ting Lu said in a report Monday.
“This pattern has rich implications for different asset classes and commodity types, so closely tracking these high frequency data is warranted,” he said.
Road and subway traffic in cities is back above pre-pandemic levels in 2019, the Nomura report said, citing mid-February data. Turnover in freight transport is still down from a year ago, the report said.
It pointed out that new home sales remained below last year’s levels, mostly dragged down by falling sales in mid-sized cities, and weighing on construction activity.
Sluggish demand for mortgages showed up in a slightly steeper drop in medium- and long-term household loans than short-term ones.
The “unemployment rate is still high which keeps household confidence weak,” Zhiwei Zhang, president and chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management, said in a note about January’s loan data. “I’d expect household confidence to improve as well in the coming months, but it will likely be a gradual process.”
China’s National Bureau of Statistics does not break out retail sales, industrial production or fixed asset investment data for January due to distortions from the Lunar New Year. The holiday’s dates on the…
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