Chinese Minister of Finance Xiao Jie (肖捷) said China is to keep cutting taxes, including increasing breaks for small and medium-sized businesses and easing burdens on individuals.
Authorities would also continue value-added tax reforms, Xiao said yesterday at a briefing on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress in Beijing.
Officials drafting a property tax are considering using common approaches adopted in other nations, Chinese Vice Minister of Finance Shi Yaobin (史耀斌) said, without indicating when such a levy might take effect.
Photo: Reuters
Xiao expanded on earlier announcements, saying China plans an additional 300 billion yuan (US$47.5 billion) of reductions in administrative fees and operating charges to bring taxes and fees down by 1.1 trillion yuan.
Policymakers on Monday pledged 800 billion yuan of tax cuts for companies and individuals last year to support growth and remain a competitive draw for investors.
They also flagged the property tax legislation push and said thresholds for levying personal income taxes would be lifted.
The process of revising the personal income tax law would be accelerated, the officials said.
“Everyone here will benefit,” Xiao said, drawing laughter from those in the room.
China’s proactive fiscal policy remains unchanged, Xiao said, after the ministry on Monday announced that it cut the budget deficit goal for the first time since 2012 to 2.6 percent of GDP from 3 percent.
The government is boosting spending on special-purpose bonds and budgeted infrastructure investment, Xiao said.
The government debt-to-GDP ratio last year fell to 36.2 percent from 36.7 percent the previous year, and it would not change significantly in the future, Xiao said, adding that outstanding government debt was 29.95 trillion yuan last year.
China’s economy last year expanded by 6.9 percent, the first full-year acceleration since 2010.
With expansion on a solid footing and debt surging, officials have signaled they want to move away from pursuing rapid growth at any cost.
The government has scrapped numerical growth targets on the broad M2 money supply, signaling a departure from the credit-led expansion of the past.
The ministry would this year boost fiscal support on smaller enterprises and aim to help them by steering more government procurement their way, Xiao said.
Separately, China is to soon get its first regularly updated monthly unemployment rate similar to closely watched gauges in other major economies like the US and Europe.
Monthly updates of China’s survey-based urban jobless rate are to be released from next month, the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics said yesterday in response to a Bloomberg News query.
Until now, the only regular official unemployment rate has been a quarterly gauge of urban joblessness that has not deviated much from about 4 percent over the past 15 years, despite economic shifts.
The surveyed jobless rate at the end of last year stood at 4.98 percent, the bureau reported in January.
The first release of the new rate is planned for some time next month and would give data for this month, the bureau told Bloomberg, without specifying an exact announcement date or saying how many cities or households the rate will be based on.
Prior releases of the index have included different samples drawn from varying numbers of cities, making comparison over time difficult.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day