China’s Continued Lack of Transparency

China’s Continued Lack of Transparency

Michael Huber - Associate Investment Analyst, CBIZ Investment Advisory Services

China’s first quarter GDP numbers came out April 15th, which showed it beat expectations despite some Wall Street analysts lowering their expectations leading up to the data release just a day before. Headlines continue to show pessimism toward the Chinese economy even after 1Q24 growth YoY coming in at 5.3% vs. the expected 5.0%. It appears March numbers were a detractor to the quarter’s growth, which shows retail sales down and industrial output falling short. This comes in the face of inflation hitting a mark near 0.2%, falling from the near 2% average that the Chinese economy has experienced over the last 10 years.

In our last blog post, we discussed the demographics of China and as the close attention we should pay to urban populations. The urban jobless rate dropped to 5.2% from 5.3% during the first quarter. The chart below depicts urban jobless claims (Blue) compared to retail sales (Green). This accounted for data surveyed from 31 major cities. Again, this isn’t an earth-shattering move one way or another, but it should be good news to some extent, especially for retail sales going forward… or maybe not. What is interesting is that just in January 2024, China started to publish youth jobless data again after taking six months off from reporting such metrics. This came after the youth jobless numbers hit a record high at the start of last summer.