Chinese Exports Grew in December

HONG KONG — Exports from China grew at their fastest clip in more than half a year in December, underpinning hopes that global trade may be stabilizing, and offering some good news for the Chinese economy as it struggles to regain momentum.

Trade data can be volatile and subject to seasonal factors that skew numbers from one month to the next, analysts cautioned, but last month’s 14.1 percent jump in exports from a year earlier topped expectations by a very wide margin, and was a clear positive for the Chinese economy, the world’s second-largest after the United States.

“The numbers were a very pleasant surprise,” Yao Wei, a China economist at Société Générale in Hong Kong, said after the data were released on Thursday. She added that the export performance over the past three months as a whole, while not excellent, showed that external demand was “on an upward trend.”

December’s jump in exports was the fastest expansion since May last year. Exports had edged up just 2.9 percent in November, and climbed 11.6 percent in October, according to official data.

“Put in perspective with the four previous export downturns, 2012 looks to have done quite well,” Xianfang Ren and Alistair Thornton, economists at IHS Global Insight in Beijing, wrote in a research note, referring to the country’s export performance.

Taken together with recent trade data from Taiwan and South Korea, Ms. Yao said, the December data from China showed that demand from the United States was fairly stable. Demand from beleaguered Europe, she said, was “not great, but not bad,” while demand from emerging markets — which have generally enjoyed far faster growth than developed nations in recent years — remained firm.

At the same time, however, the economic and budget travails of the United States and Europe continue to overshadow the global outlook, and are likely to curtail future growth, economists have long cautioned.

“With our projection for continued contraction in the euro zone and continued slowdown in the US economy,” the economists at IHS commented Thursday, “we believe China’s export sector will face another uphill battle this year — an even tougher one than 2012.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/business/global/chinese-exports-grew-in-december.html?partner=rss&emc=rss