China’s economy looks especially vulnerable to the spread of Omicron

JACK MA, THE founder of China’s giant e-commerce platform, Alibaba, started his first web company after a visit to America in 1995. Cao Dewang, the boss of Fuyao Glass, a Chinese company made famous by the documentary “American Factory”, ventured into manufacturing after a trip to the Ford Motor Museum in Michigan.

These restrictions have stopped previous variants from spreading. But periodic local lockdowns have also depressed consumption, especially of services like catering. And the restrictions on cross-border travel will inflict unseen damage on innovation. Cutting business-travel spending in half is as bad for a country’s productivity as cutting R&D spending by a quarter, according to one study by Mariacristina Piva of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan and her co-authors.

But worse scenarios are imaginable. If China suffers a property slump as bad as the one it endured in 2014-15, GDP growth could fall to 3% in the fourth quarter of 2022, compared with a year earlier, according to Oxford Economics, a consultancy. That would drag growth for the whole year down to 3.8%. If housing investment instead crashed as badly as it did in America or Spain in the second half of the 2000s, growth in China could fall to 1% in the final quarter of 2022.

The most attractive stimulus options bypass the bloated property sector, which already commands too big a share of China’s GDP. The government could, for example, cut taxes on households, improve the social safety-net and even hand out consumption vouchers. The problem is that consumers may be slow to respond, especially if their homes are losing value. Not even China’s government can force households to spend.

Fact matters: China cases and death less than 1% of US with 4X its population.

Because Chinese old pas. They are afraid to die. Thats why my Chinese friend told me.

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