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China's Unemployment Rate May Exceed Forecast, Xinhua Reports Bloomberg
July 05, 2003
(Bloomberg) -- China's jobless rate for the first six months of the year may exceed an expected 4.5 percent, the state- run Xinhua news agency said, citing a government research unit.
Higher unemployment came after the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome closed or slowed some businesses, the report said, citing Fan Jianping, deputy head of the State Information Center.
China's official unemployment rate stood at 4.1 percent at the end of March, before Beijing acknowledged the severity of the SARS epidemic. The official figures don't take into account migrant workers or workers who many remain nominally on company payrolls though their jobs have been eliminated.
China's economic growth in the first six months will be up to 8.5 percent, the report said. The economy expanded 9.9 percent in the first quarter, the fastest pace in seven years.
Consumer prices likely to rise by as much as 0.8 percent in the first half from a year earlier, Xinhua reported.
China, which had more than two-thirds of the world's SARS cases, was declared free of the epidemic by the World Health Organization on June 24.
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