Beijing, Jan 18 (IANS): China has lowered its final 2017 GDP growth from 6.9 per cent, announced initially, to 6.8 per cent, the National Bureau of Statistics of China said on Friday.

China calculates its GDP in two phases: first, preliminary estimations are done, which gave rise to the figure of 6.9 per cent revealed in January 2018, reports Efe news.

There is then another phase of final revision, whose results were published on Friday, the bureau said in a statement on its website.

According to the final review, China's GDP in 2017 was not 82.71 trillion yuan ($12.2 trillion) as previously published but 82.08 trillion yuan ($12.1 trillion).

This new calculation yields a difference of 630 billion yuan, reflected in the decline of 0.1 percentage points in the final figure.

The revision was made public only three days before China reveals its GDP data for the fourth quarter of 2018 and the year's cumulative total, which will finally shed light on whether the country managed to reach its target of 6.5 per cent.

The global economic slowdown and the trade war with the US are the two factors that could lead to a drop in the GDP of the fourth quarter. Other economic data such as exports and automobile sales already reflect this downward trend.

Analysts predict that GDP growth will continue to fall in the first half of 2019 and will stabilise in the second to arrive at a figure of 6-6.3 per cent.