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Professor Lin Yifu: China's Economic
Growth will Continue
By Zhou Xiang
PKU NEWS
http://ennews.pku.edu.cn/news.php?s=76291108
Renown economist, professor Lin Yifu gave a speech focusing on Chinese economy
on Jan 31st, 2004 in School of Law Science, University of Fordham, one of the
cooperating members of BiMBA. After his influential speech, we made an interview
and following are some of his point view concerning current hot-debated issues.
Q: Chinese economy shows an increase by 9.1 % despite of the negative influence
of SARS in 2003. Some overseas media cast their doubts on this. Is there some sort
of exaggeration?
Lin: first I want to state that China has shown a genuine high growing speech recent
years. China shows a tendency of current shrinking as early as 1998, however,
during the 5 years after that, China still carried on a growing speed as high as 7.8%
per year. That is why some foreign media keep their doubts on this point. According
to international economic theory, whenever a deflation occurs in a country, there
should appear zero growth or negative growth. Why our nation can keep a high
growing speech in this sense? The only explanation is that different countries have
different causes of deflation. China has been long in an imperfect economy. Price
falling was an effect of improved productive ability and over-supply of commodities.
Economic growth comes from consumption and investment. In this sense, although
the domestic consuming capability stayed the same recent years, infrastructure
investment due to positive governmental policy has stimulated fixed asset
investment of the entire society and has pushed forward the national economic
development as a whole.
There is no basis doubting on our statistics. We have two economic statistic systems
now: one is reporting system, the other, investigation system. We has established
over 6,000 specialized monitoring spot nationwide, which are responsible for statistic
investigation and data collection about economic development. Currently our
economic statistics are mainly relied on the latter, which in a larger sense eradicated
exaggerations in reporting. As a result, the economic growing rated we reported is
1470