Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday,

we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. It's still six months out from

France's presidential election, but early campaigning is telling.

Emmanuel Macron's rapid rise to the presidency shook up France's political order,

and that's making the fate of his re-election bid extremely unpredictable.

And there's no shortage of management advice on how to make meetings work more efficiently.

But our columnist picks an unusual model to work from, one that's been tried and tested for more than eight centuries.

First up, though, At a news conference this morning, China's Statistics Bureau released the country's latest economic figures.

GDP is up 4.9% over the same quarter of last year. country's latest economic figures.

GDP is up 4.9% over the same quarter of last year, but only 0.2% over the last quarter.

A quick burst of growth that came with the first stages of pandemic recovery is clearly now slowing down in China.

But President Xi Jinping's government seems prepared to sacrifice

short-term growth to build a stronger economy in the long run. The growth figure that China reported

today was slightly below expectations and those expectations were already pretty modest.

Simon Cox is the economist's China economics editor. Prior to the pandemic, China never reported a growth figure below 5%.

This one was 4.9%.

China's dealing with a number of problems right now.

It's been helped by strong exports, but there are a variety of difficulties in the property sector

dealing with the pandemic and also dealing with the power sector,

all of which have weighed on growth.

And so let's pick apart the reasons here one at a time.

How much does this tell you about the way China is recovering from the pandemic?

...