China may lower economic growth target

The government will make efforts to slow down the rapidly expanding economy in the coming year, the China Daily Thursday quoted Yi Xianrong as saying.

This will create necessary conditions to upgrade the current growth pattern that relies on real estate and exports, the researcher from Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said.

In the third quarter of 2012, China's economy grew by 7.4 percent year-on-year, bringing the figure for the first three quarters to 7.7 percent, which is 0.2 percentage points higher than the growth target for the full year.

However, the pace of growth had slowed successively from 8.1 percent in the first quarter of 2012, to 7.6 percent in the second, then down slightly again in the third, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

China will not see stunning expansion in its gross domestic product but will see a much-improved economic growth model in the next year, the newspaper quoted Yi as saying.