Brasil e China no Reordenamento das Relações ... - Funag

china economic developments, prospects and lessons
China’s negligible net-export growth – had brought GDP growth to
over 9 percent. In 2003, the deadly SARS epidemic caused major
domestic economic disturbances such that government stimulus
efforts to keep the economy going pushed growth to 10 percent for
the year. When SARS proved less contagious than expected, the
government stimulus provoked higher price inflation in 2004 and
subsequent credit-tightening efforts to cool industrial investment in
2005. The effort dropped the CPI to under 2 percent. But machinery
imports slowed so dramatically in 2005 that China’s first major
global trade surplus appeared. GDP growth in 2005 accelerated to
over 11 percent, in part from swollen net exports, but also on a surge
in construction activity heavily linked to expansion of the housing
market. China’s trade surplus then grew even larger in 2006-07,
as global demand for China’s exports continued to balloon while
domestically China oscillated between investment expansion and
efforts to quell inflation.
Hence, until 2005, China’s trade surplus was not a significant
contribution to GDP growth. Beginning in 2005, the trade surplus
added to what by 2003-04 had already become 10-percent expansion.
The trade surplus appeared not because China’s exports accelerated
further but because China’s import growth slowed. China’s domestic
growth was no longer able to absorb the imports that Chinese exports
had made it possible to afford. By the end of 2007, inflation had
become a worry with the CPI again close to 5 percent. China’s growth
had not been export-led but rather export-overheated. From 2005 to
2007, real GDP growth went from 11 percent to 14 percent. China’s
trade surplus added between 2.0 and 2½ percentage points to growth
in domestic demand that was already between 9 and 11½ percent.
This is important empirical information; it contributes to our
understanding of China’s experience during and after the financial
crisis. China’s trade surpluses could not have caused the global crisis;
they appeared too late. Further, China’s growth strategy did not rely
on exports or export promotion schemes to expand so rapidly; the
core demand stimulus was domestic. The same investment-funding
techniques responsible for sustaining core pre-crisis domestic demand
also served to implement the domestic stimulus program that shielded
Chinese growth from the crisis’ shock of global trade collapse.
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