China’s response to pandemic impressive – IMF

LONDON — China’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has been impressive, an International Monetary Fund official said on Tuesday, adding that it had once again managed to do well when faced with a major crisis.

The Chinese economy managed to end 2020 — the year in which the coronavirus pandemic brought most of the global economy to a halt — in positive territory. Its GDP (gross domestic product) came in at 2,3 percent last year and is expected to expand by 8,4 percent by the end of 2021, according to the IMF.

This means that China’s economy has not been as severely hit by the Covid- induced shock as much of the rest of the world.“China is really an impressive example of an outlier in the positive sense,” said Tobias Adrian, director of the IMF’s monetary and capital markets department.

“They have cracked down on the pandemic very aggressively, very early and the economy really already came back to normal levels at the middle of last year, so way ahead of any country in the world.”

Though the virus quickly spread across the world, China’s aggressive stance in containing the virus at the start of 2020 enabled it to better control waves of new cases.

Its measures included travel restrictions, strict lockdowns and a very fast rollout of health facilities.“

So for the second time now with a major crisis, China has fared very well,” Adrian said, drawing a comparison with the global financial crisis of 2008. –