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

albert keidel
equivalent to the serious challenge it posed in 2007, before the financial
crisis erupted full-blown. Foreign trade patterns showed a decline in
China’s trade surplus from pre-crisis levels. Both export and import
growth trends recovered almost to their pre-crisis pace, although imports
grew moderately faster than exports.
Overall, in terms of post-crisis performance, therefore, China if
anything may have been even a bit too successful. To fight price inflation,
the government has been trying to slow growth ever since 2010. The
widespread concern is that China will have to slow growth much more
if it is to cap inflation. This would be a “hard landing” for the economy.
Recent price data make this more likely.
This back-and-forth between growth and inflation has characterized
China’s growth since its reforms and international opening began in the
late 1970s. China has had as many as a half-dozen cycles of boom and
slowdown. They seem to be unavoidable, and China may be unable to
avoid the next growth downturn either. The ideal would be to anticipate
the downturn and moderate its seriousness. This is the illusive “soft
landing” spoken of so often. Unfortunately, mid-2011 data showed that
even though China’s GDP growth had slowed, inflation was if anything
a more serious threat than before.
But down cycles have not been all bad for China over the decades. In
addition to taming inflation, they have pointed out which firms, especially
state-owned and state-controlled firms, are in so much trouble that they
need to be sold to the private sector, merged with a better-managed firm,
dramatically restructured or closed altogether. Such dramatic moves are
difficult without a downturn’s illumination of enterprise weaknesses. It
is the kind of “shakeout” common in developed-country business cycle
downturns. Weak firms fail, poor performing workers finally get laid off,
and old wasteful practices are dropped.
The output record is clearest in quarterly GDP statistics. Official
year-on-year (Y-o-Y) data comparing GDP output in the second quarter
of 2011 with the second quarter of 2010 showed steady growth at an
admirable 9.5%. But quarter-on-quarter (Q-o-Q) data, adjusted for their
very strong seasonality, show that output growth slipped to 8.3 percent
(Figure 2).
Figure 2 also shows the problems policy makers can run into by
relying too heavily on headline year-on-year (Y-o-Y) quarterly growth
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