BEIJING: China cannot delay reforms to rebalance its economy and will set policies to achieve relatively fast growth and stable prices that should help total trade maintain double digit growth this year, Vice Premier Li Keqiang said on Sunday.
Li, widely expected to succeed Wen Jiabao as Premier in a leadership transition that begins later this year, said policymakers would focus efforts on boosting domestic demand and pursuing structural reforms that would make growth more stable and balanced.
"We will make policies more targeted, flexible and forward-looking to maintain relatively fast economic growth and keep price levels basically stable," he said in a speech at an economic policy conference.
He expected China's total trade to maintain double-digit growth this year. The government has an official target of 10 percent growth in both imports and exports for 2012.
Exports are a key source of demand and jobs for China's vast factory sector and have been a principal driver of wealth creation for much of the last decade in the wake of the country's accession to the World Trade Organisation.
China's trade balance plunged $31.5 billion into the red in February as imports swamped exports to leave the largest deficit in at least a decade and fuel doubts about the extent to which frail foreign demand drove the drop.
Import growth of 39.6 percent on the year in February was the strongest in a year, well ahead of the 27 percent expected and more than twice the rate of export growth of 18.4 percent that was barely more than half the pace forecast -- albeit at a six month high.
Li said that there were some encouraging signs emerging about the pace of global economic recovery, and forecast that China's total trade would top $10 trillion in the five years 2011-2015, but added that the outlook was not certain, with efforts to resolve Europe's debt crisis still evolving.
Comments
Comments are closed for this article.