The December Economic Work Conference
Special points to highlight in this issue:
It is too early to say for sure, but it looks like the Economic Work Conference for later this month will settle on a GDP growth target of “around 6 percent”, which I interpret to mean 5.8 percent to 6.0 percent. There has been an enormous amount of debate and positioning in the two months leading up to the conference, with most economic policy advisors warning about the need to constrain credit growth against a vocal minority who worry more about GDP growth slowing below 6 percent.
Every December the Economic Work Conference brings together in Beijing major policymakers to determine economic policy for the next year, and I have kept postponing this issue of the newsletter in the hopes that by waiting a little longer I would be able to include reliable guesses on what GDP growth target is likely to come out of this month’s conference. As of yet there has been no announcement of the date at which meeting will take place, but it typically happens in the last two weeks of December.
The three-day conference is always held in Jingxi Hotel, a PLA-run hotel with high security and no walk-in customers about 3 kilometers from Zhongnanhai, the party leadership compound. Xi Jinping, Li Keqiang and Liu He are all expected to attend, along with, in principle, all 204 members of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, including provincial governors and the heads and most senior members of all the financial regulatory entities, the SOEs, the major financial institutions, the army, and all senior officials involved in economic planning. On March 5, the Premier should deliver to the National People’s Congress the various targets decided in the Economic Work Conference, including the GDP growth target, after which we will know officially what was decided, but long before then the gossip mill will have revealed the most important targets.
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