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Hong Kong.- It seems as if the Chinese economy were paralyzed. A barometer that has closely observed the performance of the

LE BOURGET, France — The chief executive of Boeing’s commercial jet division on Monday sought to dispel some of the pessimism at this year’s Paris Air Show, arguing that the global economy was showing signs of a recovery and predicting a resumption of growth in airline traffic as early as 2010.

“At this point it appears to us that the economic conditions have bottomed,” said Scott E. Carson, chief executive of Boeing Commercial Airplanes. “If they have bottomed and a recovery comes next year, I think we have a shot at getting through.”

Boeing has said it would not cut back on its assembly lines this year, though it expects to cut production rates for its long-range, wide-body 777 jet by 28 percent in mid-2010. It also shelved planned increases in 767 and 747 production.

Boeing’s European rival, Airbus, has reduced output of both its A320 single-aisle plane and its A380 superjumbo. It has abandoned plans to increase production of its wide-body A330.

Mr. Carson said Boeing’s moves on wide-body production were a specific reaction to the decline in air freight traffic that began in the fall of 2008. World air cargo traffic fell about 6 percent in 2008 and is expected to drop another 17 percent in 2009.

“There remains some risk to the freight side, but also an opportunity,” Mr. Carson said. “The next six months are going to be incredibly important to us as we watch to see if inventory rebuilding begins — which I believe it will.”

Mr. Carson added that he believed the current credit squeeze affecting airlines would be short-lived and that a “more normal trend” in lending would emerge by the second half of 2010.

Mr. Carson’s optimism was not universally shared by other participants at the Paris Air Show, however, where a thick gray mantle of clouds hung over the opening day’s proceedings.

“You’ve got to look at the postrecession environment,” said Sash Tusa, an independent aerospace industry consultant in London. “What will be the effect of a rising interest-rate environment?”

The global economic slowdown has hit the airline industry hard, with passenger traffic expected to fall by 8 percent this year. Just this month, the International Air Transport Association nearly doubled its forecast for 2009 industry losses to $9 billion from a prediction of $4.7 billion. The industry lost $10.4 billion in 2008.

“I think the winter is going to be horrible” for air travel, said Nick Cunningham, an aerospace and airline industry analyst with Evolution Securities in London. “Returning to growth again is still about another year out — in other words, you’re looking at another 12 months of traffic still declining.”

“This is not a recovery,” Mr. Cunningham said. “This is just the worst juncture for year-on-year decline.”

Airbus, for its part, remains decidedly more cautious. During the weekend, Louis Gallois, chief executive of the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company, known as EADS, the parent company of Airbus, said that it was still impossible to predict when an economic turnaround might come. “We have no capacity now to see what will be the depth of the crisis,” Mr. Gallois said.

Boeing, based in Chicago, last week lowered its 20-year market forecast for the first time in 10 years, albeit only slightly. The company said annual air traffic growth, which has averaged more than 5 percent in the last 30 years, would dip to 4.9 percent a year in the next two decades. Aircraft deliveries for the period would fall by just 400 planes to 29,000, Boeing predicted.

Randy J. Tinseth, vice president for marketing of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, acknowledged that the forecast was based on assumptions made this year about air traffic trends, which at the time assumed only a 5 percent decline in passenger traffic. Boeing plans to publish a revised forecast after the summer, Mr. Tinseth said.

Mr. Carson said he did not expect the credit crisis to have a significant impact on the company’s near-term deliveries. Boeing has a total order book valued at around $265 billion, currently equivalent to around seven years of production.

“We believe we have the most coveted backlog in this industry — perhaps in the history of this industry,” Mr. Carson said.

Included in that backlog are about 860 jets of the company’s newest flagship model, the 787 Dreamliner, which is due to make its first flight this month. The first 787 delivery, to All Nippon Airways of Japan, is scheduled for the first quarter of 2010. Mr. Carson said he did not foresee any financing trouble for the airlines lined up to buy the first of these jets.

The 787 backlog extends into 2020, he added, “so that’s a very long time with lots of opportunity for economic recovery.”

Separately, Bob Smith, chief innovation officer at the avionics company Honeywell, said that Asia — which has had some of the world’s fastest expansion in air traffic in recent years — was holding up relatively well.

China and India were still experiencing healthy growth, he added, saying, “For the aviation world, that’s important.”

YEKATERINBURG, Russia — Leaders of the four largest emerging market economies discussed ways to reduce their reliance on the United States at their first formal summit meeting on Tuesday. But they concluded with only a cautious statement suggesting a move away from the dollar’s role in global commerce and a call for greater representation of developing countries in global financial institutions.

By some predictions, the four nations, Brazil, Russia, India and China, a group referred to as the BRIC group, will surpass the current leading economies by the middle of this century, a tectonic shift that by this reckoning will eventually nudge the United States and Western Europe away from the center of world productivity and power.

Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, said the main point of the meeting was to show that “the BRIC should create conditions for a more just world order.”

The four countries produce about 15 percent of the world’s gross domestic product and hold about 40 percent of the gold and hard currency reserves, but they are not a unified bloc and do not do enough business among themselves to justify a trade alliance.

Russia and Brazil export natural resources, China exports manufactured goods and India bases its growth primarily on domestic demand. As such, India is not as concerned with the status of the dollar and is by no means as intent on scoring ideological points against the United States as is Russia.

The acronym BRIC was coined by a Goldman Sachs economist in 2001 to describe the four countries that were expected to surpass today’s largest economies by 2050, owing to their faster growth rate.

A communiqué issued after the meeting highlighted the common goals of a “greater voice” in international financial institutions and a “more diversified” global monetary system. They agreed to meet again in 2010, in Brazil.

The gathering was the second of back-to-back summit meetings sponsored by Russia in this city in the Ural Mountains on the divide between Europe and Asia.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a regional security alliance intended loosely as a counterweight to NATO, met in an expanded format with many Eurasian nations holding observer status. It even included a brief appearance by the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose disputed re-election last week has touched off street demonstrations in Tehran.

In a sign of regional economic integration, China’s president, Hu Jintao, pledged $10 billion in aid to Central Asian nations in the group, which consists of China, Russia and four former Soviet states: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

Mr. Hu and Mr. Medvedev then met separately with India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, and the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Mr. Medvedev encouraged China, the world’s largest holder of dollar reserves, and other nations to put their money in some other currency or financial mechanism. He also urged members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to use their national currencies in conducting bilateral trade.

“There can be no successful currency system, and particularly a global system, if the financial instruments that are used are denominated in only one currency,” Mr. Medvedev said. “Today, this is the case and the currency is the dollar.”

A top economic policy aide to Mr. Medvedev, Arkady Dvorkovich, said Russia would like to diversify its currency reserves away from dollars by buying bonds from Brazil, China and India, but only if they bought Russian rubles as a reserve.

The dollar fell slightly against the euro and other currencies on Tuesday, though some traders quoted by Bloomberg News cited a more workaday cause: good results on new American housing starts were encouraging investors to move out of Treasury bonds and into equities.

Vikas Bajaj contributed reporting from New Delhi, Alexei Barrionuevo from Rio de Janeiro, and Keith Bradsher from Hong Kong.

LE BOURGET, FRANCE — When the glitterati of the aviation world last gathered here, the order announcements for multimillion-dollar jets, helicopters and other high-tech hardware were so frequent that it felt like a week-long New Year’s Eve party with champagne corks popping all the time. A parade of sheiks, generals and ministers were whisked in their limousines from one contract signing to the next, leaving beaming sales executives to celebrate their good fortune.

That was 2007, when international air traffic was still growing steadily and global airline profits were on the rise, continuing the long, painful recovery from the devastating losses of $13 billion in 2001, the year of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Airbus and Boeing, the world’s two leading aircraft makers, walked away with order books fat enough to keep their assembly lines humming for several years.

It seems like ancient history. When the Paris Air Show — which marks its 100th anniversary this year — opens its gates at Le Bourget, a small airport outside Paris on Monday, a record 2,000 exhibitors from 48 countries will be in attendance. But the atmosphere will be markedly different. There may still be champagne in the corporate chalets — this is France, after all — but it will be flowing a lot less freely.