China's economy grows by 8.1% to $18 tn in 2021

Beijing: China's economy grew by 8.1 per cent in 2021 to about $18 trillion, stated to be the best by the world's second largest economy in a decade, amidst challenges, including sporadic epidemic resurgences and a complicated external environment, the government said on Monday.

The country's GDP expanded 8.1 per cent year-on-year to 114.37 trillion

yuan (about $18 trillion) last year, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said on Monday.

The pace was well above the government target of "above 6 per cent", and put the two-year average growth at 5.1 per cent, the NBS data showed.

China's economy grew 8.1 per cent year-on-year in 2021, despite sporadic epidemic resurgences and a complicated external environment, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

However, the NBS also announced that China's

population grew to 1.41 billion by the end of last year, increasing by less than half-a-million as the birth rate fell for

the fifth consecutive year, stoking fears of a looming demographic crisis and a consequent economic slowdown in

the world's most populous nation.

At the end of 2021, China's population on the mainland grew to 1.4126 billion from 1.4120 billion in 2020, the NBS said. China's population increased by 480,000 year-on-year, down from 12 million in 2020.

Experts have warned that a demographic turning point may be just around the corner in the world's most populous nation, and some say it

threatens to erode the foundation of China's booming

economic growth over the past 40 years, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported.

The most shocking part of the data released today is

that the natural growth of

the population has dropped to 0.34 per thousand, the first time below 1.0 since data became available, Zhang

Zhiwei, chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management said.

The demographic challenge is well known, but the speed of population ageing is clearly faster than expected. This suggests China's total population may have reached its peak in 2020. It also indicates China's potential growth is likely slowing faster than expected, he was quoted as saying by the Post.

China permitted all couples to have two children in 2016, scrapping the draconian decades-old one-child policy. Last year, China passed a revised Population and

Family Planning Law, allowing Chinese couples to have three children, in an apparent attempt to address the reluctance of couples to have more kids due to mounting costs.

As per the data from the 2020 census, the demographic crisis China faced was expected to deepen as the population above 60 years grew to 264 million, up by 18.7 per cent.

On the economic front, the official figures released by the NBS said China's economy grew by four per

cent in the fourth quarter of last year, slowing from the 4.9 per cent growth in the third quarter, rounding

off the full year's growth rate to 8.1 per cent in 2021.

The GDP increase is also above the six per cent target set by the government for the year.