NEW YORK – In early March, Premier Li Keqiang announced that China is targeting GDP growth of “about 5.5 percent” this year. That would be ambitious even without Russia’s war against Ukraine and the attendant increases in global energy and food prices. Back in January, for example, the International Monetary Fund forecast that the Chinese economy would grow by only 4.8 percent in 2022. And in 2019, the last full year before the COVID-19 pandemic, GDP increased by just under 6 percent.
By my calculation, the decline in China’s working-age population is reducing the economy’s potential growth rate by roughly 0.2 percentage points a year. So, if all other factors were like those prevailing in 2019, China’s GDP could potentially grow in 2022 by about 5.4 percent.
But today, both the Ukraine war and an expected series of interest-rate increases by the U.S. Federal Reserve this year have made the external environment much less favorable to growth. The OECD estimates that
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