Giovanni Douven: China, a fascinating perspective of the economy and logistics

The Business Research Centre of the InHolland University of Applied Sciences sees developments in China having an important impact on our economy. Giovanni Douven, lecturer-researcher at  InHolland, was recently a speaker and participant at an international logistics congress in the city of Zhengzhou in Henan Province. In this article Giovanni discusses, in general, economic and logistical aspects of China and, in particular, Henan Province.

Logistics infrastructure
China has a surface area of 9.6 million square kilometres compared to the EU’s 4.4 million square km. The rail network is just about comparable at 125,000 km of track but the road network differs enormously: China’s road network totals 130,000 km whilst the European Union has 7 million km. There are 2,347 airports in the EU while China has only 507. Daxing Airport (67 km from Beijing and planned to be operational from 2019) is being equipped to handle more than 100 million passengers. Beijing Capital Airport, Hong Kong and Shanghai, with respectively 93, 70 and 66 million passengers, are China’s largest airports. London and Paris, with 75 and 66 million passengers, are comparable to Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Trade better in balance
In 2017 Chinese GDP was almost 44 times larger than it was in 1990. China’s share of the total income from global trade is over 25%. There are more and more signals that China is changing to becoming an importing state whilst at the same time retaining its export interests. Chinese exports shrank in March 2018 by 2.7% while imports in the same month rose by 14%. China had, therefore, a trade deficit of US$5 billion in March. In February this had been a surplus of over US$33 billion. In the first quarter of 2018 exports rose by 14.1% whilst imports increased by nearly 20%. This still resulted in a quarterly trade surplus of US$48.4 billion. However, when compared with previous years, it showed a considerable shrinkage: in the first quarter of 2017 the surplus had been US$65 billion and in 2016 US$110 billion.

Read the full article on page 64 in Cargo Magazine click here

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