Photo:Xinhua

China's 2020 economic growth rate may drop to as low as 5.3 percent due to the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak, said Li Daokui, a senior economist who once served as an adviser for China's central bank.

If that were to happen, the world's economy could be comprehensively impacted as China has become the biggest manufacturing power with huge import demand, another economist told the Global Times.

A previous prediction of China's 2020 GDP growth rate by an economic research institute of Tsinghua University was 6.1 percent. In a document Li sent to the Global Times, he said that considering the impact of the epidemic, the growth rate should be between 5.3 and 5.9 percent in 2020.

China's GDP growth rate was 6.1 percent in 2019, and despite being its lowest in 27 years, China's contribution rate to world economic growth in 2019 is expected to be about 30 percent, according to Ning Jizhe, head of China's National Bureau of Statistics.

"If the number really goes down to 5.3, China's contribution rate to world economic growth would be only between 20 and 30 percent, resulting in a comprehensive negative impact on global economic development," Liu Xuezhi, an economist at the Bank of Communications, told the Global Times on Saturday.

China is the largest manufacturing power in the world. If its economy continues to slow, it would severely damage the world's industrial chain, Liu noted, adding that some multinational companies such as Samsung and Apple have been affected due to delayed operation resumption in China.

As the scale of China's middle class is growing, China has become a major consumption market for the world. "So the decrease of China's domestic demand, which has become a main engine of the world's economic growth, would also result in a slowdown for other countries' relative industries," Liu noted.

However, he said that "if we take some other factors into consideration, such as macro policies which have more room to adjust through the rest of the year, the situation could be better."