China will face great difficulty in achieving economic growth above 6.5% over the 2016-2020 period due to slowing global demand and rising labor costs at home, the China Securities Journal quotes a top state adviser as saying.
Li Wei, president of the State Council’s Development Research Centre, made the comments at a conference over the weekend, the newspaper reported on Monday.
“In the last 30 years of reforms and opening up, China’s gross domestic product has posted annual growth of around 10%. Against this, 6.5% is not high, but it will be very difficult to achieve this pace of growth,” he said.
He said the main impeding factors were a likely global economic slowdown, rising labor costs that were eroding China’s competitive advantage, and growing environmental concerns which meant that the country could not industrialize arable land at as rapid a pace as before.
President Xi Jinping has said that China must keep annual average growth at no less than 6.5% over the next five years to hit the country’s goal of doubling gross domestic product and per capita income by 2020 from 2010.
China is set to release fourth-quarter and full-year GDP data on Jan 19. It is expected to report 2015 growth cooled to around 7%, the slowest in a quarter of a century.