The upcoming annual China-U.S. Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED) in Washington, D.C., is expected to expand economic and trade cooperation between the world's two largest economies, seek coordination in the international financial system and enhance overall bilateral relations more steadily, U.S. experts said.
GLOBAL ECONOMY & MACRO-ECONOMIC POLICY
Concerns about the global economy and each other's macro- economic policy will continue to be the key issues on the economic agenda of the high-level China-U.S. dialogue that will start on Tuesday, said Yukon Huang, a former World Bank's country director for China and a senior associate with the Asia Program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
More than six years after the global financial crisis, the world economy remains moderate and uneven. "China's economy is slowing down. The American economy appears to be getting back on a sound footing but not entirely clear", while the Federal Reserve " looks like going to actually start increasing interest rates" this year, Huang told Xinhua in an interview, noting that all these factors will have implications for the fragile global recovery.
"The big question would be how is the U.S. economy doing? Is China being able to stabilize its economy? Is it going to be able to put in place the reforms so that it can continue growing rapidly? " Huang said of questions likely to be raised by China and U.S. officials at the dialogue.
As the world's two largest economies, the U.S. and China are increasingly economically interdependent, with their trade volume hitting 550 billion U.S. dollars last year and their combined economies accounting for about 40 percent of recent global GDP growth. Both sides have an enormous stake in each other's economic performance, and also a joint possibility to pursue policies that support the global economy.
Paul Gruenwald, Standard & Poor's chief economist for the Asia- Pacific region, said the U.S. and China economic conditions are the two most important issues by far during his talks with securities issuers, investors, other stakeholders, and the media in the region.
"We think the risks of a downside in China have actually fallen over the last couple of months," Gruenwald told reporters in New York last week. "That's because the authorities are being more aggressive in trying to make sure that the local government financing is more solid."
Adam Posen, president of Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), also held positive views of China's economy after leading a group of U.S. economists to visit China last month.
It's "a good thing" for China's economy to slow down as Chinese leadership pushes forward economic reforms and wants to "go for a sustainable rate of growth", Posen said in a separate interview with Xinhua ."We both believe they're doing a good job overall. The economy is on a path that isn't going to be too bad. I think it bodes well for the future."
David Dollar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, believed the most important part of the economic dialogue will be "a strategic discussion of issues in the global economy," including the risk of a Greek default and exit from the euro zone as well as the implications of the Fed's exit from quantitative easing.
