China's economy grows 11.5 pc in third quarter

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BEIJING, Oct 25 (AFP): China's economy expanded at a blistering pace in the third quarter, the government said today, even as it declared the immediate overheating risk had receded thanks to a series of control measures.
The world's fourth-largest economy grew by 11.5 per cent in the third quarter and the first nine months of 2007, compared with the same periods a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics said.
"Due to the macrocontrol policies adopted by the central government, we have prevented the economy shifting from speedy growth to overheating," bureau spokesman Li Xiaochao told a briefing in Beijing.
"The energy supply situation has improved markedly, the transporation systems have expanded, and the bottleneck problems have been eased."
As evidence of the slight slowdown, he pointed out that economic growth in the second quarter had been 11.9 per cent.
Inflation, too, was down in September, standing at 6.2 per cent compared with 6.5 per cent in August, he said.
Even so, China is all but certain to experience its fourth consecutive year of double-digit growth in 2007 and is expected to soon overtake Germany as the world's number three economy.
Investment spending remained the major driver of economic growth, accounting for more than 40 per cent of the increase in the gross domestic product in the first nine months, Li said.
The bureau confirmed that fixed-asset investments expanded by 25.7 per cent in the first nine months of 2007 from the same period a year ago.
The figure marked a wafer-sized easing from the first half of the year, when investments in fixed assets were up 25.9 per cent.
Fixed-asset investments cover mostly state-controlled enterprises' spending on plant and equipment, a major source of growth in the world's fourth-largest economy.
Only Wednesday, Premier Wen Jiabao called for more curbs on investment and credit, signalling that the government believed more needed to be done to keep the economy under control.
But economists said this was not a sign of panic among China's policy makers.