Experts, entrepreneurs laud Chinese premier's address at WEF(2)

Adam Posen, president of Peterson Institute for International Economics, said Li's speech has verified his previous judgement that the slowdown of China's economic growth will not deliver a shock to the country's economy or affect its steady and sound development.

To some extent, the slowdown of the Chinese economy's pace is a good thing, which means the foundation of economic growth will become more solid, he said, predicting that China's economy is not facing a hard landing.

Mark Weinberger, global chairman and CEO of Ernst & Young, said that he has been watching for a long time whether China will gradually transform its economic development model into a more balanced one. China's initiative to deepen its comprehensive economic reform is very necessary and timely, he emphasized.

Ma Yun, founder and chairman of China's e-commerce giant Alibaba, said the new normal of the Chinese economy reflects that China attaches more significance to quality of economic development rather than quantity.

INITIATIVES AND CONFIDENCE

In recent years, China has been eyeing economic upgrading through coordinating its financial and monetary policies and through long-term investment in such areas as infrastructure.

China has also proposed or promoted a host of initiatives, including the Silk Road Economic Zone, the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, the Development Bank of BRICS (the bloc of the five countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, as part of efforts to fund global public investment and pursue win-win results.

Commenting on these initiatives, Gros said a distinction should be made between internal investment drive and the financing of investment abroad.

"Internal infrastructure investment has been useful to maintain demand and employment in the short run, but it does little to address the domestic demand deficiency," he explained, adding that Chinese efforts to finance global public investment are laudable.

Noting that these initiatives will help push growth, Erixon said that "new investments that are combined with economic reforms have a much better multiplying effect."

Regarding China's trade policies, the ECIPE chief said China's efforts to spur regional trade integration are important and the global market has seen an increasing competitive presence of Chinese companies while countries with a protectionist sentiment towards Chinese are declining in number.

Sergey Gorkov, vice chairman of the board of Russia's Sberbank, told Xinhua that he was excited by Li's remarks. "We have been looking to expand business in China, Premier Li's speech gives us a very strong signal to turn our wishes into reality," he said, "his promise to continuously propel the RMB (the Chinese yuan) internationalization process will create favorable conditions for expanding Russia-China financial cooperation."

Roger Barnett, chairman of the board of US Shaklee Corporation, said that the Chinese premier's speech at the WEF meeting has strengthened his confidence in exploiting the Chinese market via upbeat economic outlook and inspiring structural reform and opening-up resolve.