China's 2019 growth to slow to 6.2% despite policy support - Reuters poll

A Reuters poll on Friday showed that a majority of the economists see the Chinese GDP growth rate slowing down to a near three-decade lows of 6.2% this year amid dwindling domestic and overseas demand.

Key Findings:

“The median forecast was slightly lower than the 6.3 percent economists had predicted in the last poll in January.

Most of the 88 institutions covered in the survey do not expect growth to bottom out until later in the year as looser monetary condition and fiscal stimulus take time to percolate through the economy and revive domestic demand.

The full-year forecast of 6.2 percent would still fall within the government’s target of 6.0-6.5 percent, but it would mark the weakest pace of growth China has seen in 29 years, and spell a further deceleration from 6.6 percent in 2018 and 6.8 percent in 2017.

Growth next year will likely cool further to 6.0 percent, the poll showed.

First-quarter growth was seen cooling to 6.3 percent from a year earlier, the same as in the previous poll, from 6.4 percent in the fourth-quarter of 2018, the weakest pace since the global financial crisis.”