China raised its 2008 growth estimate to 9.6 percent from 9 percent and said this year's quarterly figures will increase, narrowing the gap with Japan, the world's second-biggest economy.

Gross domestic product was $4.6 trillion last year, the statistics bureau said at a briefing in Beijing yesterday. That compares with the World Bank's estimate of $4.9 trillion for Japan.

China's expansion will be more than 8 percent in 2009, according to government officials, and the nation is poised to overtake Japan next year, International Monetary Fund projections show. The figures result from an economic census that showed a bigger contribution from services and continue a pattern of China revising up preliminary growth estimates.

"The big underlying factor propelling China's growth is the continued migration of people from the agricultural sector to the more modern economy — industry and services," said David Cohen, an economist at Action Economic in Singapore. "There's no stopping China."

For 2009, revisions will mainly affect the value of the year's gross domestic product, with a "very small" impact on the growth rate, said Peng Zhilong, the head of the bureau's national economy calculation department.

China's expansion in 2008 compares with U.S. growth of less than 1 percent. The Indian economy expanded 6.7 percent in the fiscal year ended March 2009.

This year, the Chinese economy grew 8.9 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier, 7.9 percent in the second and 6.1 percent in the first. The government has pledged to maintain a "moderately loose" monetary policy in 2010 to sustain a rebound driven by a stimulus package and record lending.

China's economy was 4.4 percent bigger in 2008 than originally estimated, the figures showed. In comparison, a previous census in 2005 showed the statistics bureau had under-estimated the size of the 2004 economy by 17 percent.