China Growth Slowing

China is finally having the economic impact its backers have long predicted. The country’s boom accounted for almost one-sixth of worldwide economic growth last year. Now that its economy is slowing, the world’s most populous country may curb global expansion.

Premier Wen Jiabao’s effort to cool China’s growth rate to about 7 percent from last year’s 9.1 percent may trim global growth by half a percentage point in 2005 and Asia’s expansion by a full percentage point, said Stephen S. Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley & Co. in New York.

China’s boom accounted for about a fifth of the growth in global trade in 2003, about five times its impact a decade ago, said Nicholas Lardy, China scholar at the Institute for International Economics, a nonpartisan research group in Washington. Its imports rose by 40 percent in 2003.

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