COLOGNE, Germany (AFP) -- China will wrest the "world's champion exporter" title from Germany as early as 2008, the federal foreign trade body BFAI has predicted.

Already this year, China will overtake the United States as the world's number two exporter and fight neck-and-neck with Germany for the number one position, BFAI director Gerd Herx said Monday.

However, Germany will just succeed in holding onto the title for the fifth year in a row in 2007.

But with an estimated 1.4 trillion dollars (1.1 trillion euros) in exports in 2008, China will leapfrog Germany in 2008, Herx said.

China's increasing success as an exporter rests on its electronic goods, where the country is already the number one with total exports of 300 billion dollars, ahead of the U.S. and South Korea, BFAI estimated.

Its second-biggest category of exports is clothing and textiles.

Germany's export strength lies in engineering and technological goods.Chinese economy will not slow down after 2008 Olympics: economist

The Chinese economy would not suffer from a slowdown after the 2008 Beijing Olympics as vigorous demand would remain, state media reported Tuesday, citing an influential economist.

"Analyses show (annual) growth rates of seven to eight percent or even higher could stay for the first 25 years of the 21 century," the Beijing Youth Daily quoted Li Yining, professor in economics at Peking University, as saying.

"That means (the high speed of Chinese economic growth) is here to stay for another fifteen or 20 years," he added.

He said China would not have the worry of running short of new investment hotspots as demand would follow even if special Olympic-related needs disappeared after next year's Games.

Unemployment would not exacerbate as long as the Chinese economy continues to grow, Li said, but warned ways of utilizing Olympic sports facilities have to be explored so that staff in these places could be kept in the workforce. China's central bank to curb illegal fund inflows into stocks

China's central bank has stepped up efforts to prevent illegal fund inflows into the stock market even as investors have chalked up heavy losses over recent days, state media said Tuesday.

The Shanghai branch of the People's Bank of China has told local lenders to tighten up examination of loans to prevent the money from ending up on the stock market, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

The report cited concerns with financial authorities that mortgage loans and personal loans have been misused for stock investments.

Other state media reports have said the China Banking Regulatory Commission will launch an investigation into the use of mortgage loans for stock investments after the Lunar New Year holiday at the end of this month.

The Shanghai Securities News also reported Tuesday that the China Securities Regulatory Commission had set up a special team to supervise mutual funds to ensure fair trading.

The regulator was expected to issue guidelines on establishing a system to improve corporate governance in managed fund companies, the newspaper reported, citing unnamed sources.

The measures suggest that Chinese authorities remain keen to forestall a stock market bubble after a series of warnings which combined pushed the markets down more than 7.0 percent last week.

On Monday Chinese share prices closed 2.27 percent lower as investors remained wary that the authorities would tighten up.