OLYMPICS - BEIJING ECONOMY TO SHRUG OFF CLEAN AIR PUSH
04.18.08 - Leído 107 veces. Enviar esta notaJason Subler
Beijing’s economic growth this year will not be significantly affected by plans to shut factories and limit car use to improve air quality during the Olympics, a statistics official said on Thursday
BEIJING, China; April 18, 2008.- Yu Xiuqin, deputy head of the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics, said the impact would not be great because many large factories had already been moved out of the city and those forced to shut would be able to adjust.
“In planning their growth, these companies can anticipate (the shutdowns), and so they will be able to take appropriate measures to face them. So there’ll be some impact, but it won’t be big,” Yu told reporters.
The city’s environmental protection bureau said on Monday that the municipal government would close factories and force 19 heavy polluters to reduce emissions by 30 percent for the two months around the Olympics and Paralympics.
Beijing’s economy grew by 11.3 percent from a year earlier in the first quarter, outpacing the national average of 10.6 percent.
Yu declined to give estimates on how much the shutdowns from July 20 to Sept. 20 would affect the capital’s industrial output or overall economic growth. But she said the services sector made up more than 70 percent of the city’s economy, which could actually stand to benefit from the Olympics.
Measures to limit factory output are also planned for neighbouring Tianjin, Hebei, Inner Mongolia, Shanxi and Shandong, but details have yet to be released.
Beijing’s economic output accounts for under 3.5 percent of the country’s total.
INFLATION CONCERNS
Although hosting the Olympics would make it more difficult for Beijing to control inflation, Yu said she was confident that the government could keep prices under control.
“Consumer prices will go up during the Olympics, but that’s a normal phenomenon. No host country can avoid it,” Yu said.
“Food prices are going up and spreading to other sectors and products, plus there’s the Olympics factor — we really can’t be overly optimistic.”
Consumer prices in Beijing were up six percent from a year earlier in the first quarter, compared with eight percent nationwide, driven mainly by soaring prices for food.
Yu said she was pleasantly surprised that hotel room rates had risen only 10 percent on average in the run-up to the Games, much less than she had feared.
Yu estimated that the Olympics had contributed an average of less than 1.7 percentage points to the city’s annual economic growth over the seven years since it won the bid for the Games.
She said she did not expect Beijing’s economy to see any big slowdown after the Olympics, in part because there were plans afoot to start construction on 11 satellite cities following the Games.
“This will not only help boost investment, it will also draw people into the city and stimulate consumption,” she said.
(Reuters)
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