It’s the event of the year but the Olympic Games will have only a modest effect on China’s booming economy and are unlikely to even cause the usual post-Games slowdown experienced by many host nations.

Lehman Brothers’ chief economist for China, Sun Mingchun, said China seems to be a special case, given its size and high growth.

"The impact of the Olympic Games on China - such a big economy - will be very small. The Olympics can only add at most a 0.5 percentage point to growth," he said in Singapore yesterday (June 4).

"It’s not a big issue for China; maybe for Mexico or Spain or South Korea."

Sun tips that the economy will cool after the Games but that will be due to export slowdown and domestic policy tightening, reasons unrelated to the Olympics.

Lehman expects growth in China to slow to 9.8 per cent this year from 11.3 per cent last year, before hitting 8.8 per cent next year.

Sun also touched on the economic reverberations of the recent Sichuan earthquake. He noted that while the earthquake was an "enormous human tragedy", its impact on economic growth should be "temporary and limited".

However, the quake could send food prices higher there.

He noted in a recent report: "The quake increases upside risks to China’s inflation outlook, especially on food price inflation."