Chinese draggin’: growth slows
The Intelligence from The Economist
The Economist
4.5 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 18 October 2021
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A paltry GDP rise is down to the pandemic, power and property. We ask what growing pains President Xi Jinping will endure in the name of economic reforms. Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, will probably end up in the second round of next year’s election; who will stand against him is ever more unpredictable. And fixing meeting inefficiency with an 850-year-old idea.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. |
| 0:08.9 | Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. |
| 0:14.5 | It's still six months out from France's presidential election, but early campaigning is |
| 0:22.3 | telling. Emmanuel Macron's rapid rise to the presidency shook up France's political |
| 0:27.6 | order and that's making the fate of his reelection bid extremely unpredictable. |
| 0:32.8 | And there's no shortage of management advice on how to make meetings work more |
| 0:37.6 | efficiently, but our columnist picks an unusual model to work from, one that's |
| 0:42.6 | been tried and tested for more than eight centuries. |
| 0:47.0 | First up though. |
| 1:03.1 | At a news conference this morning, China's statistics bureau released the country's latest |
| 1:07.2 | economic figures. |
| 1:11.5 | GDP is up 4.9% over the same quarter of last year, but only 0.2% over the last quarter. |
| 1:19.4 | A quick burst of growth that came with the first stages of pandemic recovery is clearly |
| 1:23.6 | now slowing down in China, but President Xi Jinping's government seems prepared to sacrifice |
| 1:29.2 | short-term growth to build a stronger economy in the long run. |
| 1:33.3 | The growth figure that China reported today was slightly below expectations and those expectations |
| 1:39.0 | were already pretty modest. |
| 1:41.2 | Simon Cox is the economist's China economics editor. |
| 1:44.6 | Prior to the pandemic, China never reported a growth figure below 5%. |
| 1:49.7 | This one was 4.9%. |
| 1:51.6 | China's dealing with a number of problems right now. |
| 1:53.8 | It's been helped by strong exports, but there are a variety of difficulties in the property |
... |
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