How much will China grow? China, the world's largest surplus country and one of the world's most export-dependent economies, faces great uncertainty about its outlook amidst the current crisis. Over forty experts offer their predictions for China's 2009 GDP growth rate.

1. Not by much--less than 2 percent:

   The consumption pattern of Chinese households does not correspond to the output that China's export industries produce.

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   DESMOND LACHMAN

   Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

   China will grow by less than 2 percent in 2009. As a highly export-oriented economy, China is critically exposed to any slowing in the global economy. Already in the fourth quarter of 2008, even China's own notoriously deficient economic statistics suggest that the Chinese economy virtually stagnated as China's export markets shrank abruptly.

   The global economic outlook confronting China in 2009 will be even more challenging than that in 2008. The International Monetary Fund is now estimating that the major industrialized economies will contract by 2 percent in 2009, or by the most in the post-war period. However, there is strong reason to believe that the IMF is again being overly sanguine about the global economic outlook. Japan's economy is in virtual freefall and deflation has returned; Europe's banking system is being shocked by the meltdown in East Europe and the global recession is now exposing basic flaws in the euro; and the new U.S. administration has failed to deliver on a sufficiently front-loaded fiscal stimulus package or on a coherent financial market plan that might end the U.S. economy's downward spiral anytime soon.

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   The optimists argue that even if China's export markets were to collapse or protectionism were to intensify, China has the wherewithal to aggressively use fiscal and monetary policy to pump up domestic demand. What the optimists fail to see is that such an approach is highly unlikely to forestall a massive wave of bankruptcies and a steep rise in unemployment in China's export-industrial heartland along its coastal plain. They also underestimate the notion that at the heart of China's present macroeconomic challenge is the fact that the consumption pattern of Chinese households does not correspond to the output that China's export industries produce.

   China's stimulus plan will not be enough to protect the Chinese economy.

   SIMON SERFATY

   Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geostrategy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Senior Professor and Eminent Scholar in International Studies, Old Dominion University

   This recession is likely to prove deeper and lengthier than presently anticipated. Most individual and institutional economic forecasters remain relatively optimistic and even complacent. Conditions will get worse for much of 2009 at least--possibly much worse in the context of predictable political turbulence in Europe and elsewhere, or even due to new security instabilities whose content remains unpredictable but whose negative consequences on the global economic conjecture can readily be predicted. Admittedly, China's stimulus plan is ambitious, but that will not be enough to protect the Chinese economy from its dependence on the vitality of its senior trade partners--including the United States, Germany, and Japan, which China will continue to outperform, to be sure, but in the very low range of positive growth and probably below a 2 percent range for the year.

   Chinese officials proclaimed that the fourth-quarter 2008 growth rate had slipped to 6.8 percent year-on-year. This was misleading.

   HARALD B. MALMGREN

   President, The Malmgren Group

   Without the statistical boost of previous quarters, growth in the fourth quarter was at or near zero--and the first quarter of 2009 is unlikely to fare better. Chinese growth has been highly dependent on exports and on domestic construction geared to international business activity. World trade has been contracting in recent months as deleveraging and credit contraction spread throughout world financial markets, generating massive, global demand destruction. Since World War II, world trade grew at roughly double the speed of world production. Now, the falling volume of world trade tells us that production is declining everywhere. The world--China included--has tipped into a downward spiral which is continuing in 2009. We have entered a period of global industrial overcapacity.

   Now, China's exports are plummeting, manufacturing is seizing up, and domestic construction has come to a halt. Chinese demand for raw materials from other countries is collapsing. As Chinese factories are shut down one after another, unemployment is escalating and millions of workers have begun migrating back to rural villages. In response, the Chinese leadership hurriedly cobbled together a RMB [yen] 4 trillion stimulus package. Immediately, questions spread throughout China in editorials and the internet: What exactly were the stimulus measures? Which sectors and regions would get help? Were the measures effective, or just aimed at pacifying key groups?

   In late February, Chinese leaders leaked possibilities of even more ambitious measures, but political leaders could not agree before convening the annual People's National Congress in March. Many western economic experts falsely assume that because China is a command economy, stimulus can be devised without controversy, and the export engine can easily be replaced with a new domestic growth engine. A command economy suffers from absence of transparency and weak price signals, and must function under bureaucratic decision procedures. Stimulus is passed down through many hands, with significant "leakage" before it is operational. Infrastructure spending can help substitute for the loss of exports, but gearing up infrastructure projects is a process which takes years, not months in any kind of economy. In other words, shifting from export-led growth to domestic-led growth will take time, with little benefit in 2009. Even the International Monetary Fund's recent forecast for 6.7 percent Chinese GDP growth in 2009 seems highly unlikely.

   Less than 2 percent.

   PAUL DEROSA

   Mt. Lucas Management Corp.

   Watch for the Chinese multiplier effect.

   MARSHALL I. GOLDMAN

   Senior Scholar, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University

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   Because so little of China's economic growth derives from domestic demand (a consequence of a high savings rate), economic trouble in countries that have been importers of Chinese manufactured goods has a disproportionate impact on China itself. (We can call it the Chinese multiplier effect.) The difficulties will be compounded because the Chinese have had so little experience dealing with economic recessions. As a result, they do not have in place automatic stabilizers such as Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation-type bank deposit insurance and unemployment insurance that older market-type economies have adopted to ameliorate economic downturns.

2. China's economy will grow by a little--roughly 5 percent:

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   MAKOTO UTSUMI

   President and CEO, Japan Credit Rating Agency, Ltd., and former Vice Minister of Finance for International Affairs, Japan

   Let's look at the electric power generation in China. In October 2008, it was down 4 percent (compared with the previous year), in November 2008 down 9.6 percent, and in December 2008 down 12.4 percent.

   Considering that 90 percent of electric power generation in China is for industry use, one might be skeptical of the 6.7 percent GDP growth in the fourth quarter of 2008.

   Anyway, it seems clear that economic activity is sharply deteriorating in that country, producing a huge amount of unemployment and social risk.

   The stimulus measures are gigantic. But looking back to Japanese experiences in 1990s, infrastructure investment is not a panacea, especially when the economic downturn is so sharp, damaging the confidence inside and outside of the country.

   DINO KOS

   Managing Director, Portales Partners, and former Executive Vice President, Markets Group, Federal Reserve Bank of New York

   Uniquely among large economic powers, Chinese output data is released the day after the quarter or year ends and is never revised--while typically showing steady growth that varies little from year to year. How's that for efficiency in data collection! China's output data is more a political report than an economic one. In the middle part of this decade real growth was likely higher than the numbers reported. This year and next the reverse is likely to be true. China's economy is sliding into recession now that its main export markets have collapsed. However, reported growth is likely to come in at about 5 percent even if actual output--properly measured and reported--is much lower.

   GARY CLYDE HUFBAUER

   Reginald Jones Senior Fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics

   Recently, 1 spent a week in Hong Kong. Everyone there has views on China's growth in 2009--as goes China, so goes Hong Kong. Since the Chinese authorities here forecast 6 percent plus, that will likely be the reported rate. However, I was more persuaded by pessimists than optimists. Correctly measured, growth will probably be less than 6 percent.

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   The modest relative size of the consumer sector of the Middle Kingdom limits the ability of the overall economy to overcome the painfully sharp drop in manufacturing exports.

   MURRAY WEIDENBAUM

   Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor and Honorary Chairman of the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at Washington University in St. Louis

   The globally oriented economy of China is more likely to grow by 5 percent in 2009 than the optimistic 6.7 percent predicted by the International Monetary Fund. This is a time when the modest relative size of the consumer sector of the Middle Kingdom limits the ability of the overall economy to overcome the painfully sharp drop in manufacturing exports that China is now experiencing.

   At best, the government's stimulus program will offset the decline in private investment that is resulting from the sharp fall-off in foreign...