During the last four years the EU's economy has grown by -0.3%, the US by 0.6%, and China by 42.2%

The full scale of the difference in economic performance of China compared to the US, Europe and Japan during the international financial crisis is shown in Figure 1. It is summarised in the following figures:

• In the four years to the latest available data, for the 3rd quarter of 2011, China’s GDP expanded by 42.2%
• In the four years to the latest available data, also for the 3rd quarter of 2011, US GDP increased by 0.6%.
• In the four years to the latest available data, for the 2nd quarter of 2011, European Union (EU) GDP shrank by 0.3%.
• In the four years to the latest available data, for the 2nd quarter of 2011, Japan’s GDP contracted by 5.2%.

Figure 1

 

 

These are evidently extraordinary statistics. During this four year period China’s economy expanded 70 times as fast as the US.

Such data also clearly refutes the current attempt to claim that in China there is an economic ‘crisis’ in some sense equivalent to that in the US or Europe. Such arguments are intellectually sloppy (at best) attempts to undermine rational thought by destroying any serious quantitative comparisons.  

To give examples of such claims, a recent article by Nouriel Roubini and Ian Bremmer in the Wall Street Journal is introduced: ‘With Europe, China and the U.S. in crisis, the real question is which of them will stumble first.’ Similarly Will Hutton in the UK’s Observer claims: ‘Nobody would start from here – an ill-designed single currency interacting with an insupportable burden of private debt created by oversized, undercapitalised banks. And it's as much a problem in the US and China as in Europe.’

The data given above shows such claims are false. GDP growth of 42.2% in China, an annualised 9.8%, is not remotely comparable to the US’s annualised 0.2%, or the EU’s annualised minus 0.1%.

Naturally it is impossible to have an annual 9.8% growth rate for almost four years and have no problems at all – in fact no economy ever has no problems! China has had consumer price inflation, primarily due to international commodity price increases, which reached 6.5% before falling and it has had excessively high house price increases – which are also now falling. But none of this constitutes a ‘crisis’ on anything quantitative scale remotely approaching that of the US and Europe.

Nor, to take Hutton’s point, does the EU financial crisis have anything like the same impact in China, or even the US, as in the EU. The effect of the decline in imports from the EU on China’s exports is noticeable but only in the sense that it reduces China’s overall export growth from a very high to a high rate of growth – 15.8% last month, in a factual situation in which none which China’s GDP growth in the last four years has come from net trade. Indeed reduction of China’s trade surplus means that net trade has been a subtraction from China’s GDP growth during that period. The exposure of China’s banks to Europe’s debt crisis is also minimal. While the financial exposure of the US to the Eurozone is certainly higher than China’s there is also no indication that the actual scale of crisis or defaults in Europe is pushing the US into recession – whereas a double dip recession in Europe itself is extremely possible.

Hutton, in short, is engaging in inflated rhetoric to attempt to create a relative equals sign between the situation in China (and the US) and that in Europe when none exists. Inflated rhetoric is merely a form of destroying the quantitative scale of comparison which is a precondition for rational thought.

The GDP data for China, US and Europe GDP data should also end attempts by Kate Mackenzie the Financial Times and Nouriel Roubini to present the US’s Michael Pettis, and similar analysts, as having had a correct analysis of China. Michael Pettis runs an objectively moderated blog on China but his analysis of China has been factually shown to be quite erroneous – claiming that: 'the US would be the first major economy out of the crisis and China one of the last.’ Evidently a situation where China has grown by 42.2% and the US has grown by 0.6% shows the reverse has been the case. Claims that it is too early to judge whether China or the US has been more successful in coming through the financial crisis are just attempts to avoid the test of facts that has taken place. Even if, against the evidence, China’s economy were now to slow significantly the scale of growth it has already achieved demonstrates that has come through the financial crisis far more successfully than the US or Europe.

The basis of any serious analysis or theory is facts. Those who refuse to refer to the data of the relative performance of China, the US or Europe during the last four years do so only because their analyses will not stand the test of examination by these facts.