Gary Rieschel, founder of Qiming Venture Partners, expects China's stock market to bounce back this year. Nelson Ching / Bloomberg

Junheng Li, founder of J.L. Warren Capital, the New York-based equity analyst firm, says there is a risk that China's growth could slow substantially in the medium term.

She believes the GDP figure could slip below what some see as the psychological 7 percent floor in 2013 and slide further to between 5 and 6 percent in 2014.

"Without large-scale stimulus, I think the economy will continue to slide in 2013. I predict only 5 to 6 percent normalized GDP growth over the next three to five years at best," she says.

Li believes the Chinese government needs to focus on measures that boost consumer spending.

"They need to focus on domestic consumption by improving the pension system. Most of the pension funds are losing money because of the 65 percent slump in the stock market since 2007," she says.

"There also needs to be emphasis on making healthcare and quality education more affordable so people feel confident they can spend money and not always have to worry about putting money aside for this."

Goolam Ballim, group chief economist of Africa's largest bank, Standard Bank, in Johannesburg, says many African nations now see China's growth figure as a key economic indicator since it could have a major bearing on their economic fortunes.

"China is front and center of Africa's external risks. If China's growth was to slow to 6 percent, which would be nominally respectable, it would be the equivalent of spawning a commodities recession on the continent," he says.

"This would stymie Africa's exports with further consequent impact on local currencies in turn leading to inflation that would erode real incomes and encourage monetary policy tightening. In short, you can clearly see there is a transmission mechanism where any movement in China's growth rate could be quite meaningful to Africa."

The US economy remains one many analysts remain optimistic about.

Steve Brice, chief investment strategist at Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore, believes the US could actually be at the vanguard of something of a global recovery in 2013.

"The fiscal uncertainty looks as though it is going to lead to weak first-quarter figures but once that is out of the way, I think the underlying economy still has quite strong momentum and that GDP growth could average 3 percent in the second half."

The optimism about the US does not extend to Rieschel at Qiming Venture Partners. He believes the world's largest economy is precariously placed and could easily slide into recession again, which would be hammer blow to China and the rest of the world.

"If the US economy just shows level growth in the first quarter and I wouldn't be surprised if it falls into recession in the second quarter, which would weaken the already difficult situation in Europe and be bad for China's exports also," he says.