Chinese economy faces challenges
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2004-04-25 08:45

Governor of the People's Bank of China (PBOC) Zhou Xiaochuan said on Saturday that the Chinese economy is facing challenges but the prospective growth is rosy.

In a written speech to the International Monetary and Financial Committee held in Washington, Zhou said that the Chinese economy experienced sound development in 2003, with gross domestic product (GDP) growing by 9.1 percent over the previous year and per capita GDP reaching US$1,100, passing an important milestone.

The main challenges facing the Chinese economy are that aggregate investment in some industries and regions is somewhat excessive, inflationary pressures are building up and much remain to be done in the areas of employment and social security, he said.

The Chinese central bank governor stressed that solutions to these problems will require China to pay even closer attention to proper macroeconomic management and to the proper handling of the relationship between reform, development and stability.

To deal with the accelerating rise of the commodity prices index during the past six months, China employed a combination of monetary policy tools and strengthened preemptive adjustments and fine-tuning by controlling excessive growth of monetary credit, Zhou said.

For instance, the PBOC has twice employed required reserve ratio as a monetary policy tool to strengthen macroeconomic management, he said. It has raised the required reserve ratio by 1.5 percentage points from 6 percent to 7.5 percent.

On the exchange rate of Chinese currency Renminbi, he said that, in the medium and long terms, the Renminbi exchange rate will develop in the direction of increased flexibility. But current focus of the Chinese government is, while deepening financial reforms, to take further steps toward exploring and improving Renminbi exchange rate formation mechanisms.

Zhou said that so far this year, the Chinese economy has continued to grow at a rapid rate and this year's growth target for the Chinese economy is about 7 percent.

The International Monetary and Financial Committee is the policy-making body of the International Monetary Fund.

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