Coronavirus: economy in China’s Covid-19 epicentre Hubei shrank 40 per cent in first quarter of 2020
- Gross domestic product (GDP) in Hubei, the seventh largest provincial economy in China in 2019, lost 39.2 per cent in the first quarter
- The first quarter contraction was the largest since the 1938 war with Japan that devastated the economies of Hubei and its neighbouring provinces
The economy of the Chinese province that was the initial epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak shrank by nearly 40 per cent in the first quarter of 2020 amid the government’s draconian lockdown measures, by far the largest economic contraction of any of China’s 31 provincial-level jurisdictions at the start of the year.
Gross domestic product (GDP) in Hubei, the seventh largest provincial economy in China in 2019, lost 39.2 per cent in the first quarter compared to the same period last year, according to the provincial statistics bureau. This was the largest published drop for any province since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
The drop, which was far deeper than the nationwide decline of 6.8 per cent, meant in value terms, that the province’s economic output shrank 273.1 billion yuan (US$38.6 billion) to 637.9 billion yuan (US$90.2 billion) in the first three months of the year.
Ye Qing, deputy head of the provincial statistics bureau, wrote on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, that Hubei had made huge sacrifices to contain the spread of the virus.
Such a deep fall in the province with an area just larger than Cambodia is almost unprecedented. The official archive of the province showed that Hubei’s economy continued to grow even during the Great Famine in early 1960s and the Cultural Revolution from 1966-76.
