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HANOI - THE global economic slowdown this year could push China's growth rate back into single digits, Asian Development Bank (ADB) President Haruhiko Kuroda said in Hanoi on Wednesday.
'Probably this year the Chinese economic growth will slow down from 11.4 per cent last year to 10 per cent or even less than 10 per cent this year,' Mr Kuroda said at a meeting with Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung.
'And such a slowdown is inevitable in view of the global economic slowdown and in some sense necessary and appropriate in order to contain inflationary pressure.'
China - which has seen five years of double-digit gross domestic product growth - on Tuesday reported a 7.1 per cent increase in consumer prices for January year-on-year, the highest rate since September 1996.
'Interestingly even the Chinese finance minister argued that probably this year the Chinese economy will slow down because of a substantial slowdown in the US economy,' Mr Kuroda said, referring to a recent meeting with the Chinese official.
'The major challenge for the Chinese economy is not the slowdown of economic growth but inflationary pressures in the Chinese economy.'
He also told Dung that 'likewise the Vietnamese economy will slightly slow down this year'.
'As far as 2008 is concerned, probably the Vietnamese economy will slow down slightly from 8.5 per cent last year to around eight percent because of a significant slowdown of global economic growth,' he said. -- AFP
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