For the second time, China has ‘fared well’ in a major crisis: IMF

For the second time, China has ‘fared well’ in a major crisis: IMF

A staff member checks information of a woman who just finishes her quarantine at a quarantine center on March 16, 2020 in Shanghai, China.

LONDON “” China's response to the coronavirus pandemic has been impressive, an International Monetary Fund official told CNBC on Tuesday, adding that it had once again managed to do well when faced with a major crisis.

The Chinese economy managed to end 2020 “” the year in which the coronavirus pandemic brought most of the global economy to a halt “” in positive territory.

Its GDP (gross domestic product) came in at 2.3% last year and is expected to expand by 8.4% by the end of 2021, according to the IMF. This means that China's economy has not been as severely hit by the Covid-induced shock as much of the rest of the world.

"China is really an impressive example of an outlier in the positive sense," Tobias Adrian, director of the IMF's monetary and capital markets department, told CNBC's Joumanna Bercetche Tuesday.

"They have cracked down on the pandemic very aggressively, very early and the economy really already came back to normal levels at the middle of last year, so way ahead of any country in the world."

The first cases