5.2. Managing local government debt
With the central government actively encouraging their creation, local government investment corporations (LICs) spread like wildfire under the stimulus programme and were on the front line in competing for investment funding and bank credit. With threequarters of the stimulus investments made by local governments, the LICs played a leading role in investing in infrastructure and were, as a group, the biggest players. In the sea of liquidity and permissiveness, they proliferated and greatly expanded their scale of operation. According to the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC), LICs grabbed nearly one-third of all new loans issued in 2009 and increased their total debt by CNY 3 trillion to CNY 7.38 trillion at year-end (Investors Bulletin, 2010). In the first quarter of 2010, LICs accounted for 40% of all new bank loans (Investors Bulletin, 2010; Wei, 2010).
More recent estimates, based on findings by the National Audit Office and the central bank, are that the total debt of LICs is likely to have reached CNY 10-14 trillion by year-end 2010 (Yang, 2011). It is the investment hunger of LICs/local governments that has helped inflate the stimulus programme and push the economy into overheating.
The super-sized stimulus programme has left in its wake a huge run-up in local government debt whose dimensions and potential effects are still not yet known. This is because China has no reliable national figures on local government debt despite a decadelong effort at building a debt-reporting system in the Ministry of Finance. A main reason is that, aside from the bonds issued by the Ministry of Finance on behalf of local governments, local government debt is primarily accumulated through LICs: investigators at the CBRC estimated that local government debt totalled CNY 11 trillion at the end of 2009, of which LIC debt accounted for CNY 7.38 trillion.
In aggregate terms, the implied level of local government debt (of CNY 15-20 trillion in total15), equal to around 40% of GDP in 2010, is not especially alarming. Servicing the debt, though, may pose problems for local governments, given how highly constrained their budgets are under the present intergovernmental fiscal system where they have no taxing powers and are already straining to meet growing expenditure needs. As a result, the UDIC/ LIC model is heavily reliant on rising land valuations to supply investment funding and debt servicing, but such a revenue source is highly cyclical and volatile. In addition, some localities have taken on far larger debts, and they will be especially vulnerable. The central bank’s Tianjin branch, for example, reported that the municipality’s LICs doubled their debt in 2009 (Bateson, 2010).
Equally worrisome for the national government is the extent to which the banking sector is dependent on the LIC loans and their quality. Nation-wide, the People’s Bank of China estimates that LICs account for “less than 30%” of all outstanding bank loans, but the degree of exposure varies greatly across banks and regions (Caixin net, 2011). This share is highest for the China Development Bank, which has had the longest history of lending to LICs and where LICs accounted for more than half of total loans in 2009. In Tianjin, LICs took 62.5% of all new loans issued in the city in 2009, and they were 17 of the 20 largest recipients of new loans during the year (Bateson, 2010).
LICs are not new. As noted in Box 1 above, they have been a fixture of municipal finance since the 1990s and have made substantial contributions to financing urbanisation in China. However, LICs operate in the interstices of China’s mixed economic system, and no national agency has oversight over them – not the Ministry of Finance (MoF), nor the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the Ministry of Construction (MoC) nor the China Banking Regulatory Commission. There are no reliable national statistics on LICs
because there is no system in place that requires LICs to report on their activities or financial status. LICs are not under the purview of either the fiscal or the administrative planning systems. At present, the management of public investments is fragmented under the MoF, the NDRC, the State Science and Technology Commission and the MoC, and there is little co-ordination among them. Although the planning system still requires administrative
approval for large projects that are above specified thresholds, it applies only to projects that are funded by public funds. Because LICs rely mainly on bank finance, there is no requirement for them to report on either their sources or their uses of funding.
Since mid-2009, the government has been engaged in a massive catching-up exercise, with several regulatory agencies undertaking investigations and surveys of LICs to collect information, including the CBRC, the Audit Office, the Ministry of Finance and the NDRC. These agencies found numerous and serious problems with LIC loans. The most common were that fiscal guarantees were widely used as backing for the loans in lieu of collateral, and that when land was held as collateral, excessively optimistic valuations were placed on it. In Tianjin, the central bank found that loans backed by traditional collateral accounted for only 22% of the 2009 lending to LICs, while 71% were backed only by guarantees (Bateson, 2010). Nation-wide, the CBRC reported that 47% of all LIC debt was guaranteed by fiscal revenues, and it classified 26% of LIC debt as “high risk” at midyear 2010 (GaveKal-Dragonomics, 2010).
5.3. Reform challenges for macroeconomic management in China
After more than three decades of market-oriented reform, the Chinese economy is highly decentralised, and the central government’s ability to direct national policy implementation is attenuated. The stimulus programme was intended to leverage fiscal inputs to produce a much larger effect through mobilising other “social” resources.
However, a decentralised system of investment finance requires a financial sector that has the capacity for appraising the viability of projects and the credit-worthiness of the borrowers. These conditions were clearly absent when the majority of the borrowers were LICs whose financial relationships with local governments are often ambiguous, and when the LICs were allowed to borrow for “bundles” of projects. Moreover, local government finances are themselves extremely complex and non-transparent. Fiscal resources are scattered across several budgetary and extrabudgetary accounts, reporting is incomplete, and there is little co-ordination among them.
The stimulus programme has once again exposed the “Achilles’ heel” of China’s macroeconomic management: the tendency toward overinvestment that is rooted in the growth orientation and soft budget constraint of state sector agents, including local governments. Hardening the budget constraints requires a system with clearly defined responsibilities and accountability, which are lacking in the current intergovernmental fiscal system.
The stimulus programme, its implementation and exit have shown the extent to which the government continues to rely on administrative instruments, alongside indirect/market instruments, to manage the macro economy. The experience has shown both the advantages – quick results – and the disadvantages – inefficiencies and distortions. The use of administrative controls is both a cause and a symptom of the immaturity of markets. To
rein in the build-up of local government debt, for example, the government will, in the short term, resort to instituting freezes and caps on LICs, to buy time for building up an appropriate institutional and legal framework for improving their governance.
The bigger challenge, though, is to strengthen governance for the whole public sector to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of public expenditures and public investment. Reforming the intergovernmental fiscal system will be a prerequisite to strengthening accountability for the whole sector.
Notes
1. The United States stimulus including temporary tax cuts and increased government spending was worth just over USD 700 billion, or about 5% of GDP, spread over two years.
2. In 1998, government revenues were less than 12% of GDP. In 2008, the level was 19.5%.
3. This consumption-type VAT was put under “pilot implementation” in the northeastern provinces of Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang in 2004, and a nation-wide rollout was then expected to follow within 2-3 years.
4. The cost of this change in VAT was projected at CNY 120 billion but, as investment grew by 30% in 2009, the tax cut also grew in size.
5. For example, the central SASAC collected CNY 55 billion in dividends from firms under its supervision in 2009. These funds are normally kept by the SASACs.
6. Naughton (2009) has written vividly of the sense of urgency that permeated all levels of government in China during this period, from the central government to the provinces and downward.
7. Unless otherwise noted, “local government” in this article refers to all units of sub-national government, including provinces, municipalities, counties and townships.
8. In 2010, the central government’s share was only 17.8% of total expenditures (budget report presented at the National People’s Congress, March 2011).
9. Data on fixed investment end in 2006 because, with a change in budget classifications in 2007, capital spending is no longer reported in budget statistics.
10. These are lower income provinces that are the main recipients of intergovernmental transfers.
11. People’s Bank of China and China Banking Regulatory Commission (2009), “Some guiding opinions on further strengthening the adjustment of credit structures to promote the stable and relatively rapid growth of the national economy”, 24 March, Beijing.
12. Bond issuance increased from CNY 9 billion in 2003 to CNY 396 billion in 2005, to CNY 6
5.2. Managing local government debt
With the central government actively encouraging their creation, local government investment corporations (LICs) spread like wildfire under the stimulus programme and were on the front line in competing for investment funding and bank credit. With threequarters of the stimulus investments made by local governments, the LICs played a leading role in investing in infrastructure and were, as a group, the biggest players. In the sea of liquidity and permissiveness, they proliferated and greatly expanded their scale of operation. According to the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC), LICs grabbed nearly one-third of all new loans issued in 2009 and increased their total debt by CNY 3 trillion to CNY 7.38 trillion at year-end (Investors Bulletin, 2010). In the first quarter of 2010, LICs accounted for 40% of all new bank loans (Investors Bulletin, 2010; Wei, 2010).
More recent estimates, based on findings by the National Audit Office and the central bank, are that the total debt of LICs is likely to have reached CNY 10-14 trillion by year-end 2010 (Yang, 2011). It is the investment hunger of LICs/local governments that has helped inflate the stimulus programme and push the economy into overheating.
The super-sized stimulus programme has left in its wake a huge run-up in local government debt whose dimensions and potential effects are still not yet known. This is because China has no reliable national figures on local government debt despite a decadelong effort at building a debt-reporting system in the Ministry of Finance. A main reason is that, aside from the bonds issued by the Ministry of Finance on behalf of local governments, local government debt is primarily accumulated through LICs: investigators at the CBRC estimated that local government debt totalled CNY 11 trillion at the end of 2009, of which LIC debt accounted for CNY 7.38 trillion.
In aggregate terms, the implied level of local government debt (of CNY 15-20 trillion in total15), equal to around 40% of GDP in 2010, is not especially alarming. Servicing the debt, though, may pose problems for local governments, given how highly constrained their budgets are under the present intergovernmental fiscal system where they have no taxing powers and are already straining to meet growing expenditure needs. As a result, the UDIC/ LIC model is heavily reliant on rising land valuations to supply investment funding and debt servicing, but such a revenue source is highly cyclical and volatile. In addition, some localities have taken on far larger debts, and they will be especially vulnerable. The central bank’s Tianjin branch, for example, reported that the municipality’s LICs doubled their debt in 2009 (Bateson, 2010).
Equally worrisome for the national government is the extent to which the banking sector is dependent on the LIC loans and their quality. Nation-wide, the People’s Bank of China estimates that LICs account for “less than 30%” of all outstanding bank loans, but the degree of exposure varies greatly across banks and regions (Caixin net, 2011). This share is highest for the China Development Bank, which has had the longest history of lending to LICs and where LICs accounted for more than half of total loans in 2009. In Tianjin, LICs took 62.5% of all new loans issued in the city in 2009, and they were 17 of the 20 largest recipients of new loans during the year (Bateson, 2010).
LICs are not new. As noted in Box 1 above, they have been a fixture of municipal finance since the 1990s and have made substantial contributions to financing urbanisation in China. However, LICs operate in the interstices of China’s mixed economic system, and no national agency has oversight over them – not the Ministry of Finance (MoF), nor the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the Ministry of Construction (MoC) nor the China Banking Regulatory Commission. There are no reliable national statistics on LICs
because there is no system in place that requires LICs to report on their activities or financial status. LICs are not under the purview of either the fiscal or the administrative planning systems. At present, the management of public investments is fragmented under the MoF, the NDRC, the State Science and Technology Commission and the MoC, and there is little co-ordination among them. Although the planning system still requires administrative
approval for large projects that are above specified thresholds, it applies only to projects that are funded by public funds. Because LICs rely mainly on bank finance, there is no requirement for them to report on either their sources or their uses of funding.
Since mid-2009, the government has been engaged in a massive catching-up exercise, with several regulatory agencies undertaking investigations and surveys of LICs to collect information, including the CBRC, the Audit Office, the Ministry of Finance and the NDRC. These agencies found numerous and serious problems with LIC loans. The most common were that fiscal guarantees were widely used as backing for the loans in lieu of collateral, and that when land was held as collateral, excessively optimistic valuations were placed on it. In Tianjin, the central bank found that loans backed by traditional collateral accounted for only 22% of the 2009 lending to LICs, while 71% were backed only by guarantees (Bateson, 2010). Nation-wide, the CBRC reported that 47% of all LIC debt was guaranteed by fiscal revenues, and it classified 26% of LIC debt as “high risk” at midyear 2010 (GaveKal-Dragonomics, 2010).
5.3. Reform challenges for macroeconomic management in China
After more than three decades of market-oriented reform, the Chinese economy is highly decentralised, and the central government’s ability to direct national policy implementation is attenuated. The stimulus programme was intended to leverage fiscal inputs to produce a much larger effect through mobilising other “social” resources.
However, a decentralised system of investment finance requires a financial sector that has the capacity for appraising the viability of projects and the credit-worthiness of the borrowers. These conditions were clearly absent when the majority of the borrowers were LICs whose financial relationships with local governments are often ambiguous, and when the LICs were allowed to borrow for “bundles” of projects. Moreover, local government finances are themselves extremely complex and non-transparent. Fiscal resources are scattered across several budgetary and extrabudgetary accounts, reporting is incomplete, and there is little co-ordination among them.
The stimulus programme has once again exposed the “Achilles’ heel” of China’s macroeconomic management: the tendency toward overinvestment that is rooted in the growth orientation and soft budget constraint of state sector agents, including local governments. Hardening the budget constraints requires a system with clearly defined responsibilities and accountability, which are lacking in the current intergovernmental fiscal system.
The stimulus programme, its implementation and exit have shown the extent to which the government continues to rely on administrative instruments, alongside indirect/market instruments, to manage the macro economy. The experience has shown both the advantages – quick results – and the disadvantages – inefficiencies and distortions. The use of administrative controls is both a cause and a symptom of the immaturity of markets. To
rein in the build-up of local government debt, for example, the government will, in the short term, resort to instituting freezes and caps on LICs, to buy time for building up an appropriate institutional and legal framework for improving their governance.
The bigger challenge, though, is to strengthen governance for the whole public sector to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of public expenditures and public investment. Reforming the intergovernmental fiscal system will be a prerequisite to strengthening accountability for the whole sector.
Notes
1. The United States stimulus including temporary tax cuts and increased government spending was worth just over USD 700 billion, or about 5% of GDP, spread over two years.
2. In 1998, government revenues were less than 12% of GDP. In 2008, the level was 19.5%.
3. This consumption-type VAT was put under “pilot implementation” in the northeastern provinces of Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang in 2004, and a nation-wide rollout was then expected to follow within 2-3 years.
4. The cost of this change in VAT was projected at CNY 120 billion but, as investment grew by 30% in 2009, the tax cut also grew in size.
5. For example, the central SASAC collected CNY 55 billion in dividends from firms under its supervision in 2009. These funds are normally kept by the SASACs.
6. Naughton (2009) has written vividly of the sense of urgency that permeated all levels of government in China during this period, from the central government to the provinces and downward.
7. Unless otherwise noted, “local government” in this article refers to all units of sub-national government, including provinces, municipalities, counties and townships.
8. In 2010, the central government’s share was only 17.8% of total expenditures (budget report presented at the National People’s Congress, March 2011).
9. Data on fixed investment end in 2006 because, with a change in budget classifications in 2007, capital spending is no longer reported in budget statistics.
10. These are lower income provinces that are the main recipients of intergovernmental transfers.
11. People’s Bank of China and China Banking Regulatory Commission (2009), “Some guiding opinions on further strengthening the adjustment of credit structures to promote the stable and relatively rapid growth of the national economy”, 24 March, Beijing.
12. Bond issuance increased from CNY 9 billion in 2003 to CNY 396 billion in 2005, to CNY 6
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