BEIJING, April 23 — The economy of Shanghai, China’s most populous city, slowed in the first quarter from the end of 2021, hurt by rare declines in industrial output and retail sales that were hammered by the country’s most serious Covid outbreak.
“In January-February, the city’s economic operation was stable, but due to the impact of the Covid outbreak in March, the first quarter was marked by stability followed by a decline,” the city’s statistics bureau said in a statement. The economic slowdown in Shanghai, which did not publish GDP data for the fourth quarter of 2021, is widely expected to have worsened in April. Its GDP contracted 6.7 per cent in January-March 2020 when the new coronavirus first emerged.
For January-March, industrial production grew 4.8 per cent from a year earlier, the data today showed.