Reporter of the Economic Business: Huang Mingyang Editor of the Economic Business: Yang Huan
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Where is the Chinese economy in? This topic will be discussed from time to time.
recently reread "China's New Economy Position: How to Get Out of Growth Dilemma", which was published in February 2017. At that time, China's economic growth slowed down and all parties waited and saw. Is this a short-term bottoming or a long-term shift? For this reason, the People's Daily published a long article, mentioning the concept of "new orientation" for the first time. The book
brings together the most influential economists and policy makers in related fields, discusses important issues such as institutional transformation, structural reform, globalization and opening up to the outside world, and conducts objective analysis and judgment on the problems faced by the economy at that time and future trends.
Their views are not only directed at one moment, but are considered from the medium and long term and focused on the overall situation. Many topics involved in the book still seem to be hot topics, and the policy direction still matches the analysis in it.
Author: Wu Jinglian/Liu He/Fan Gang
Publishing House: CITIC Publishing House Publication time: February 2017
The economic growth rate in the first quarter of this year was 4.8%. In April and May, it was greatly impacted by factors such as the epidemic. Considering the improvement in the situation in June, some experts expect the economic growth rate in the second quarter to be around 0.5%. In this way, it is still quite challenging to achieve the annual economic growth target of more than 5%.
Recently, a series of policies to stabilize the economy and growth from top to bottom have been intensively introduced. Among them, many policy measures to stabilize the real estate market from the central to local governments have particularly aroused heated discussions in the market -
Since this year, the national real estate market loosening policy involves 171 provinces, cities and localities, and various places have issued more than 300 policies. In May alone, the real estate market loosened more than 140 times, doubling from April.
How to understand the "change" and "unchange" of real estate policies? The views in the book can provide a direction for thinking.
changes
"housing for living, not for speculation" tone was determined as early as 2016, but this is not the starting point for the cooling of the property market.
By late 2016, media reported that housing prices were still "spreading soaring beyond expectations." According to the data released by the National Bureau of Statistics , based on the 2015 data of 100, the sales price index of newly built commercial housing in 70 large and medium-sized cities across the country in December 2019 has generally risen by 30 to 60.
changes occurred in 2020. In August of that year, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development and the Central Bank of and interviewed 12 key real estate companies. The new financing regulations for the "three red lines" were out, becoming a subversive event in the real estate industry.
Since then, the state has successively carried out strict controls on major financing channels such as bank loans, domestic and foreign debt financing, and trust financing. Why did the
turn happen at this point in time?
Industrial and Commercial Bank of China former president Yang Kaisheng mentioned in the section "Some Thoughts on Deleverage" that leverage ratio is divided into various leverage ratios such as the whole society, government, enterprises, and individual residents.
regards deleveraging as an important task for supply-side structural reform , and was proposed at , the Central Economic Work Conference in in December 2015; and "the document of the State Council shows that we are currently obviously focusing on deleveraging on enterprises, or non-financial enterprises."
"Why do you do this? Although there are differences in statistical calibers, the trends of statistical analysis in all aspects are basically the same. my country's overall debt ratio is not high, the government debt ratio is not too high, the individual debt ratio is relatively low, and the enterprise debt ratio is relatively high. Therefore, in this case, our focus of deleveraging should be on enterprises." Yang Kaisheng pointed out.
gives a set of data on the low personal debt ratio. "According to statistics from Bank of International Settlements, the leverage ratio of Chinese residents in 2015 was only 39.5%, while Japan was 65%, Britain was 86%, Spain was 73%, France was 56%, the United States was 77%, South Korea was 81%, Canada was 92%, Australia was 113%, etc.."
related topics were also involved in the "Leverage Ratio, Savings Rate, Real Estate" section of Liang Hong , and the then vice president of the China Economic System Reform Research Association, Fan Gang , and the "Rethinking of Real Estate Polarization and 'Urbanization' Strategy" section.
But the situation after that has obviously changed.
On the one hand, the rise in corporate sector leverage ratio has slowed down significantly before the epidemic. In 2019, the leverage ratio of non-financial enterprises increased by only 0.3 percentage points throughout the year. Except for the significant increase in the first quarter of that year, it all declined in the next three quarters.
On the other hand, the leverage ratio of China's residents' sector has become the fastest climbing among all sectors: from less than 5% in 2000 to 62.2% at the end of 2021, exceeding Germany's level and being closer to Japan.
The key two years were up 3.7 percentage points in 2019 and 6.1 percentage points in 2020 - a total of nearly 10 percentage points in two years.
Real estate loans are the main reason for the rise in residents' leverage ratio: among all residents' debts, the largest proportion is residents' medium- and long-term consumer loans (mainly housing mortgage loans), accounting for 65% of all residents' loans, and the ratio to GDP at the end of 2020 reached 40.1%.
Against this background, in August 2020, the new "three red lines" regulations were issued. The leverage ratio of the resident sector increased that year, and then fell back to 0.5 percentage points from 1.9, 1.9 and 1.8 percentage points that were soaring in the first three quarters.
In 2021, the leverage ratio of the residents' sector remained at 62.2% at the end of 2020, and there was no further increase.
remains unchanged
mentions the property market, and property tax has to be raised. From the official to the academic community, this tax type, which is considered to be highly sensitive, often attracts a lot of attention because of a little news.
As early as October 2003, the Third Plenary Session of the 16th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China proposed that "there is a unified and standardized property tax on real estate when the conditions are met." This is the first time that the central government has sent a signal to impose taxes on the personal housing maintenance link.
In January 2011, Shanghai and Chongqing launched pilot projects, but did not have the effect of "shoulder sealing the throat" on high housing prices. In the section "Theme of this round of tax system reform", Gao Peiyong, then director of the Institute of Finance and Economics Strategy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, pointed out, "Price is definitely effective. If the price is not effective, it is often because the price is not high enough."
According to statistics, Shanghai's real estate tax revenue in 2020 was 19.9 billion yuan, accounting for 3.4% of its tax revenue; Chongqing's real estate tax revenue was 7.2 billion yuan, accounting for 5%. This data also includes personal business property tax and corporate business property tax revenue. If it is only considered to be the personal housing property tax, the proportion is even lower.
In the view of many experts, this tax reform marked by real estate tax is not for tax increases, but a systematic reform involving many fields. It can guide reasonable housing consumption in the short term and promote the construction of a more fair and reasonable tax system in the long term.
Gao Peiyong pointed out that this round of tax system reform is different from any round of tax reform in previous history. One of the differences is that " direct tax is increased, and indirect tax is reduced, thereby achieving the optimization of the tax system." Personal income tax and real estate tax are both direct taxes.
He said that most people in China basically only know that there are direct taxes in real life, but not indirect taxes. "The indirect tax stage is to imply taxes in the prices of various commodities, and people unknowingly pay taxes during consumption." "The efficiency of collection has been improved, and people's pain for tax burden has been weakened. However, there are also side effects." "Indirect tax is equal to tax refunds. The higher the income, the lower the consumption expenditure of a person will account for the lower the proportion of his total income."
Since multiple ministries and commissions held a meeting to discuss last year, the expansion of real estate tax pilot cities has become a high-probability event, which has become the general tone of decision-making departments for real estate tax reform. However, with the uncertainty brought about by the repeated wave of the epidemic, stable growth is under great pressure. Against this background, policies need to stabilize expectations of all parties, including expectations of the real estate market.
In March this year, a relevant official from the Ministry of Finance said in response to reporters' questions that the pilot reform of real estate tax was carried out in accordance with the authorization of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress. Some cities have conducted investigations and surveys and preliminary research, but taking into account all aspects of the situation, the conditions for expanding the pilot cities for real estate tax reform this year are not met.
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