Several financial institutions, including Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase and Nomura Securities, have revised up their prediction of China’s economic growth this year. Zhang Zhiwei, Chief China Economist at Deutsche Bank, raised the forecast for China’s full-year GDP growth rate to 6.7%, saying that he did not see the immediate need for the government to launch a new round of fiscal stimulus. China’s growth beat analysts’ expectations in the first quarter, expanding 6.9% year-on-year. “March industrial production, retail sales and fixed-asset investment all came in above expectations,” said Zhu Haibin, Chief China Economist at JPMorgan. Zhao Yang, Chief China Economist at Nomura Securities, raised his forecast for GDP growth by 0.2 percentage point to 6.7% “We believe the resilient growth in Q1 was supported more by production and investment than other factors, as growth of industrial production and fixed-asset investment (FAI) both accelerated in year-on-year terms in the first quarter,” Zhao said. China’s economy has grown between 6.7% and 7.2% for the past 11 quarters. Some economists also believed that the strong momentum is likely to extend into the second quarter. The robust growth of private consumption has been driving the strong performance of the Chinese economy, Bloomberg reported, citing data from e-commerce platform JD.com, the Shanghai Daily reports.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) expects the Chinese economy to grow by 6.6% in 2017, down from 6.7% in 2016. It published to forecast ahead of meetings of the IMF, the World Bank and the Group of 20 major economies last week in Washington. China’s economy grew at a 6.9% annual pace from January to March, the fastest in more than a year.