The World Bank raised its forecast of China’s economic growth this year to 8.5% from 8.1% and said Tuesday that a full recovery requires progress in vaccinations against the coronavirus.
The report adds to positive signs for China, the first major economy to rebound from the pandemic. Factory and consumer activity are back above pre-outbreak levels, though authorities have reimposed travel controls in some areas to counter outbreaks of new variants of the virus, AP said.
Chinese economic growth is likely to decline to 5.4% next year as the rebound from last year’s history-making global slump fades and activity returns to normal, the World Bank said.
Its forecast was an increase over a report in April that said China and Vietnam were the only East Asian economies to achieve a “v-shaped” recovery in 2020 with output back above pre-coronavirus levels.
China is on track to vaccinate 40% of its population by early summer, but “a full recovery will also require continued progress toward achieving wide-spread immunization,” the World Bank said.
Last week China announced that more than one billion doses of the Covid vaccine had been administered in the country, as the world’s most populous nation accelerated its immunization program.
The announcement by the National Health Commission (NHC) came after the number of shots administered globally surpassed 2.5 billion on June 20. The NHC did not say how many people had been vaccinated. As elsewhere, most of the vaccines in China are given in two doses.
The pace of vaccinations has accelerated in the country of 1.4 billion people after a slow start. The total number of doses given doubled from 500 million in less than a month, according to government tallies.
