Beijing: China started its “zero Covid policy” with the intention to curb the spread of Covid-19 with widespread lockdowns and mass quarantines but in reality, it had slowed down the economic growth of the country.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics in China, the data on Friday showed that the economy expanded 0.4 per cent from a year earlier in the second quarter, worse than some economists’ expectations and the slowest growth since the first three months of 2020.
Notably, 2020 was a year when China effectively shut down the market to fight the early stages of the pandemic, and its economy shrank for the first time in 28 years, The New York Times reported.
Unemployment, the housing market and small businesses are still a mess.
“China is the shoe that has never dropped in the global economy,” said Kenneth Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard University and a former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund.