China Revises '04 GDP Growth to 10.1%
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}China has revised its gross domestic product growth for 2004 to 10.1 percent, in line with a recent upward revision of the size of the economy, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Monday.
It had previously estimated that 2004's economic output had been 9.5 percent higher than the previous year's.
In December China revised the size of 2004 economic output by a sixth after a national economic census found a larger services sector than previously reported.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Yiping Huang, chief Asia economist at Citigroup (C) in Hong Kong, saw reasons for the new figures both to comfort the authorities and to give them a little cause for concern.
"On the one hand growth has been high, so probably there is a strong need for more tightening measures," he said.
On the other hand, the structure of the economy looked more comfortable than before, with more of the private consumption that the authorities have been trying promote as a reliable source of growth to take the place of fickle investment and exports.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The bureau said the services sector in 2004 had been 10 percent bigger than in the previous year, not the 8.1 percent previously thought. That pushed up the overall growth rate.
Gross domestic product in 2004 had been 15.9878 trillion yuan ($1.98 trillion), 16.8 percent more than the previous estimate, the bureau said on its Web site (www.stats.gov.cn), giving a precise figure for the new estimates it issued last month.
Growth for 2003 was revised to 10 percent from 9.5 percent while that of 2002 was revised to 9.1 percent from 8.3 percent.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The average growth rate between 1979 and 2004 had risen by 0.2 percentage point to 9.6 percent, the bureau said.
Ou Xinqian, a vice minister of the National Development and Reform Commission, was quoted by state media on January 1 as saying that China's economy had grown 9.8 percent in 2005, revising up the commission's earlier estimate of 9.4 percent.
It was unclear whether Ou's figure would exactly match the standard government estimate due from the statistics bureau this month.