Shaukat Aziz is being interviewed by the China Daily website on Nov 4, 2016. (Photo by Wu Zheyu/chinadaily.com.cn)
Editor's note: In a long-ranging interview with China Daily website, Shaukat Aziz, the former prime minister of Pakistan, comments on China's Q3 data and discusses the opportunities and challenges both China and world are faced up with in 2017. He emphasized that the continued structural reform will definitely fuel the economy.
1. What's your evaluation of Q3 data? Many analysts pay special attention to PPI, the producer price index, which gauges factory-gate prices, which rose by 0.1 percent year-on-year in September but had been falling in China since March 2012. Does the PPI growth hint reform measures are taking effect?
The growth rate of 6.7 % is quite excellent performance, and you have to sustain it. I really believe in Chinese economy, which I saw continued growth already, and the direction of growth is positive, China's also going through a series of structural reforms, the reform will definitely fuel the economy.
I also see China has growing private sector, both public sector and private sector are growing prosperously. Of course China, being a major economy of the world, on one hand China would be subject to the global economy's changes, on the other hand global economy also be easily affected by how China performs. I tend to make positive projection. For example we could observe that the products that China produced are changing, moving towards medium-tech and high-tech. Why they are producing wide ranges of products? The value-added products and the sophistication of them would prove its value with time, which would give them with better returns, or the investment they want to make and facilitate. Chinese brand is being recognized all around the world now.
Another thing I think about China is that I've never seen any countries in the history studied about infrastructure transition, though all the countries' paces are fast and rapid, as impressive as China. So when you have infrastructure linkages, these factors would all give rise to economic growth.
The initiative brought by president Xi, One Belt One Road, it will also have massive and positive impact on Chinese economy. If you look into China and Pakistan corridor and One Belt and One Road, it will contribute broader benefits to connectivity between China and Pakistan, which will open new routes and ability to transfer goods from any parts of the world to Gwada, to western part of China very quickly. And also it will create jobs, investments and more kinds of economic activities. So I think China's economic growth and structural reform are really positive, it may faces challenges like instability of the world economy, but the projection is very positive. I'm encouraged that what Chinese government has done is continues reform agenda, that's very important, to get effective outcome.
2. Could you tell us your thoughts on the most impressive achievements and bottlenecks that developed economies and emerging markets met in 2016 respectively?
The growth rate is slowed down globally, because of various factors, which also affect emerging markets because of no emerging markets are big markets for emerging markets, right? Cause the growth rate of developed countries is slowed down and it's affecting the exports of developing countries. However, the domestic markets of emerging markets countries are growing rapidly, so we've seen rapid positive growth in emerging markets. Also the emerging market countries need to proceed continues structural reform, to make their economies more efficient and transparent, to increase professionalism, to allow private sector and public sector to compete at the highest level of the world, the level of compete has to be global standard.