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| China-Japan-Koreas |
| China's Incredible Economic Boom & Thirst For Oil |
| 2004-10-23 |
| Asia burned 22.6 million barrels a day of oil last year, accounting for 29 percent of world consumption, according to BP Plc's Statistical Review of World Energy. Asia's consumption has risen 41 percent from a decade earlier, led by demand in China. ``Asian nations are, after all, the factories of the world,'' said Song Seng Wun, an economist at G.K. Goh Holdings Ltd. in Singapore. ``If the costs of production go up due to energy prices, then'' the region may be affected more than the rest of the world. China last year surpassed Japan as the world's second- largest oil consumer after the U.S., because of a surging economy. Chinese oil use is expected to jump 15 percent to 6.3 million barrels a day this year, the International Energy Agency said. Based on China's 1997 consumption figures, a $10 a barrel increase in oil prices over a year will ``influence'' the country's consumer price index by 0.3 to 0.4 percentage points, Zheng Jingping, spokesman at National Bureau of Statistics in Beijing, said yesterday. China's 9.1 percent growth in the third quarter was faster than the 8.9 percent projected in a Bloomberg survey. (By the year 2050 China's population will reach 1.6 billion people. That's a lot of frozen Chinese dinners!) |
| Posted by:Mark Espinola |