Report summary
In 2021, China scientifically coordinated epidemic prevention and control and economic and social development. The economic fundamentals were stable and improving, and the recovery trend was becoming more and more stable. In the whole year, China's GDP reached 114367 billion yuan (calculated at constant prices), an increase of 8.1% over the previous year and an average increase of 5.1% in the two years. Nevertheless, with the continued weak consumer demand and insufficient investment power, economic growth will face greater pressure in the future. Stable growth will still be the main tone of macroeconomic policies in the future. Expanding domestic demand and stabilizing external demand may be an important direction to further strengthen the foundation of economic recovery in the future.
In December 2021, although the epidemic situation in China was still disturbed by the scattered outbreak, the policies of steady growth and stable supply and price continued to work. From the demand side, the inhibition of the multi-point spread of covid-19 epidemic on the consumption of catering and other services, the decline of Consumption Willingness caused by the continuous epidemic and the decline of non food prices jointly led to the weak year-on-year growth of the total retail sales of social consumer goods in December, which was far lower than the market expectation, with a year-on-year growth of only 1.7%, down 2.2 percentage points from November. Although the current investment in real estate development is still weak, driven by the high growth of manufacturing industry and the improvement of infrastructure, the cumulative growth rate of fixed asset investment in December increased steadily, with a cumulative year-on-year increase of 4.9%, down 0.3 percentage points from November. Supported by price factors and export substitution effect, export growth remained high in December, with a year-on-year increase of 20.9%, down 1.1 percentage points from the previous month. Due to the weakening of Chinese demand and the impact of high base effect, the import growth rate decreased in December, with a year-on-year increase of 19.5%, down 12.2 percentage points from the previous month.
From the supply side, affected by the slowdown of phased and restrictive factors such as limited power and limited production, the efforts to ensure supply and stabilize prices in the market and help enterprises to rescue have increased, and the production of mining and manufacturing industries continued to pick up, supporting the continued recovery of the added value of industries above Designated Size in December, with a year-on-year growth rate of 4.3%, 0.5 percentage points higher than that in November. In addition, the high-tech manufacturing industry still maintains a relatively high growth rate (12.1%), indicating that the high-tech manufacturing industry continues to develop and the production toughness remains stable.
