China’s economy has expanded at a rapid pace over the past three decades, underpinned by a range of economic reforms. While many of these reforms have focused on the supply side of the economy, the authorities have employed a range of policies to manage aggregate demand and control the build-up of inflationary pressures and financial risks.
The operation of macroeconomic policy in China differs from that typically used in developed economies, reflecting China’s particular institutional and economic environment.
Macroeconomic policy is implemented in a coordinated manner with authorities using a range of monetary, fiscal and regulatory policy instruments to achieve economic objectives.
China has successfully used its fiscal and monetary policy to maintain an impressive growth and is well on its way of achieving its goal of becoming a fully developed country by 2049.
- Over the past decade, Chinese authorities have used macroeconomic policies to support economic growth and to promote the longer-term policy objectives of industrialization and urbanization while also managing financial and inflationary pressures.
- To manage aggregate demand growth, monetary and fiscal policy, together with controls on the property market, have been used in a coordinated manner to respond to external shocks and domestic developments.
- The efficiency of this capital investment has fallen since 2008, as shown by falling returns on capital and the inability of recent credit growth to deliver faster growth.
- The deposit rate at commercial banks is held low by the government. This reduces household incomes from savings but ensures that China’s banks retain high profitability.
- Artificially low input costs skew incentives towards resource intensive sectors like manufacturing and heavy industry, at the expense of less resource intensive sectors, like services.
- The land system combines with central-local fiscal relations to fuel real estate investment.
- Subsidized banking profits and cronyism, reduces incentives for risk management.
- A necessary corollary of China’s extraordinarily high level of capital formation is a very low level of consumption as a proportion of GDP.
- Chinese consumption of itself has been growing rapidly in recent years, averaging over 9 percent annual growth since 2008, faster than any other East Asian Economy.
- Incomes are suppressed, high levels of precautionary savings are still incentivized by inadequacies in China’s social security system.
- Service sector development is held back.
- The balance between investment and consumption appears to have stabilized in the last two years.
- The main objectives of these reforms are to raise incomes, reduce savings and improve the business environment.