How much did China’s lockdowns slow GDP growth in the second quarter?
At one point in mid-April, Japanese investment bank Nomura estimated that as many as 45 Chinese cities and 373mn people were under some form of Covid-19 lockdown, while life in the country’s most important economic hub of Shanghai ground to a halt as residents were confined to their homes and businesses shuttered.
Those lockdowns, many of which lasted in some form well into May, led global banks to downgrade their annual gross domestic product forecasts for the world’s second-largest economy. The shutdowns even prompted a rare intervention from the country’s premier Li Keqiang, who warned that China might struggle to post growth at all in the second quarter.
And while forecasts suggest that concern may be overblown, consensus estimates of 1.2 per cent year-on-year growth would put the economy on track for its slowest expansion since the early days of the pandemic. Analysts add that the slowdown will be cushioned slightly by a factory-led economic recovery in June as lockdowns eased. Consumer spending, meanwhile, has been harder to stimulate.