China on Wednesday revised its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rate for 2019 to 6% from 6.1% after a lower estimate in manufacturing output.
The 2019 GDP turned out to be 435 billion yuan smaller than the initial January estimate, China’s estimate bureau said on Wednesday.
China’s nominal GDP was 98.7 trillion yuan in 2019. The largest change was witnessed in the manufacturing sector with value-added output reducing by 503.8 billion yuan from an earlier estimate. The other sectors with large change include finance, transportation and construction sectors, according to the latest estimates.
China often revises its old GDP data based on factors such as the collection of more comprehensive data from businesses. Beijing in January revised up the annual growth rates between 2014 and 2018. In 2019, it revised the estimated growth of 2017 GDP downwards by 0.1 percentage point to 6.8%.
Beijing didn’t publish a GDP growth target in 2020 for the first time in decades, as it struggled with the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. Since then it’s largely controlled the spread of the virus, with business activity mostly returning to normal. As a result, China is the only major economy that’s expected to grow this year, though at a slower rate of around 2%, according to economists’ forecasts.
