China’s economic growth slowed in the fourth quarter as gains in factory output and investment spending eased last month, sapping momentum as a credit clampdown adds pressure on the outlook for this year.
Gross domestic product rose 7.7 percent in the October-December period from a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics said today in Beijing, compared with 7.8 percent in the third quarter. Asian stocks pared declines and the Australian dollar and copper erased losses after GDP exceeded the median estimate of analysts in a Bloomberg News survey.
Any deeper slowdown would test leaders’ willingness to implement the broadest policy shifts since the 1990s and tackle debt-fueled investment, after President Xi Jinping scrapped a goal of “relatively fast” growth in his first year in power. The world’s second-largest economy may expand at the weakest pace in almost a quarter century in 2014, a survey showed last month, as spending on infrastructure and factories moderates.