China’s PMI Figure for September

October 03, 2012

(In an interview with CCTV News on October 3, 2012, Prof. Zhu Ning, Deputy Director of SAIF, talked about the rising of official purchasing managers' index for China in September, indicating the first upturn after three months of successive declines)

There are probably two points to look at these figures. First of all, as the number is still about 50, which means that the non-manufacturing section of the economy is still expanding? Of course, the number has dropped quite significantly from the previous month’s number, which means that the economy is still expanding but not as fast as it used to be in the past two months.

The non-manufacturing section of the economy is still going to be expanding, there are probably two reasons. One is, the non-manufacturing section of the economy relies that on exports, we know that the Europe crisis is still lingering around which is still affecting the manufacturing part of Chinese economy. So, the non-manufacturing part of the economy is picking up whether to be well. And another reason is, as the economy as well as GDP grows, it is a trend that the non-manufacturing part of the economy would be getting more proportion of the employee economy. So, given that historical pattern, it is likely that the non-manufacturing section of the economy would still keep expanding although it may be not as fast as before not as fast as some others would wish to see.