China's economy, facing notable downward pressures amid a difficult economic overhaul, grew 6.9 percent year on year in 2015, the slowest annual expansion in a quarter of a century but still enviable by global standards.
China's economic growth rate target has been set at 6.5 percent to 7 percent in 2016, with an average annual growth rate of at least 6.5 percent through 2020, Premier Li Keqiang said Saturday when presenting the government work report to an annual parliamentary session.
This year's target is aligned with China's goal of completing the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects, and takes into consideration the need to advance structural reform, Li said.
"From the GDP growth perspective, my research shows the overall GDP growth has slowed somewhat, but remains stable," Nie said, adding that the fundamentals of China's economy remain solid with robust consumption growth.
"I think the basic numbers (economic data) are pretty good, they are indicating the broad trends," David Dollar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, shared similar views.
"Probably when China's economy slows down, the GDP data may slightly overstate what's really happening, but I certainly think ... the data are basically good enough to tell us what's going on," Dollar told Xinhua.
Xu Xianchun, deputy head of the NBS, said in January that China has adopted the Special Data Dissemination Standards (SDDS) system, which was created by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), since October 2015 to improve data transparency.
China's practice is in line with international standards and its data is accepted by international organizations including the United Nations, the World Bank and the IMF, Xu said.
To help market participants better understand new developments in China's economy, Nie said it's important for China to construct good measures on the strength of the service sector as it represents a fast-growing area.
"In my analysis, I have used two commonly used measures of services, the PMI non-manufacturing index from China's National Bureau of Statistics and Caixin PMI services index, but I think more work needs to be done in this area," he said.
Regarding China's growth outlook over the next few years, Nie believed it highly depends on how successful China shifts from an investment-driven economy to a more consumption-driven economy.
"If growth in expanding areas such as services more than offset the slowing areas such as manufacturing, it is possible to see a stable growth path during the transition," Nie said.
Lardy also believed the service sector will likely continue to drive China's economic growth and help avoid a "hard landing" in the next couple of years.
He hoped that the Chinese leadership will use this opportunity to deleverage its highly indebted firms and implement the economic reform agenda that the Communist Party of China outlined more than two years ago.
"That is the most realistic basis for sustaining growth and moving China ultimately into the ranks of the high-income countries," Lardy said.
