* May FDI down 17.8 pct yr/yr but rises month-on-month
* China economist says hard to see quick economic rebound
* But Nomura sees V-shaped recovery for China economy
By Lu Jianxin and Edmund Klamann
SHANGHAI, June 15 (Reuters) - The yuan ended slightly lower against the dollar on Monday as a global dollar rise offset China's better-than-expected foreign direct investment (FDI) data for May.
The Commerce Ministry on Monday said China drew $6.4 billion in FDI in May, down 17.8 percent from a year earlier, but up from $5.9 billion in April. [ID:nBJB000634]
The FDI figure came after China posted a series of data last week painting a mixed picture of the economy, including strong investment, industrial output and retail sales, but weakness in exports and in consumer and producer prices.
"The economic data is largely in line with expectations, so the impact on the yuan's trading is limited," said a dealer at a European bank in Shanghai. He expected the yuan to stay in a range of 6.8200 to 6.8400 versus the dollar in the near term.
Spot yuan
Before trade began on Monday, the Chinese central bank fixed
the yuan's daily mid-point
As China's economy shows signs of improvement but many indicators remain very weak, economists have become increasingly divided over whether a full recovery is in sight.
Li Yang, a former adviser to the People's Bank of China, the central bank, said in remarks published on Monday that China's economy would not experience a rapid recovery because it would take time to find a new growth engine to replace sagging exports.
For the global economy, he expected at least five years would be needed to fully get over the current recession.
"China should not count on a turnaround in external demand to bring about its recovery," Li, now the director of the finance institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, was quoted as saying by the Shanghai Securities News. [ID:nPEK27382]
But Sun Mingchun, economist at Nomura in Hong Kong, projected that China's economy would stage a V-shaped recovery, raising his forecast for the economy's expansion next year to 10 percent from 8.5 percent.
"There have been both positive and negative surprises on the data front. After assessing these, we judge that the economy is well on track to achieve 8.0 percent growth this year," Sun said in a research report on Friday.
Offshore, one-year dollar/yuan non-deliverable forwards
(NDFs)
The benchmark NDFs implied yuan appreciation, which moves inversely against the NDFs' level, fell to 1.43 percent over the next 12 months from the day's spot mid-point, down from 1.67 percent implied on Friday, hit by the global dollar strength. (Editing by Chris Lewis)