WASHINGTON, April 13 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese economy has been "generally stable" with the stock market "showing signs of bottoming out and recovering," a senior Chinese official has said.
"In 2018, China's GDP (gross domestic product) increased by 6.6 percent, contributing nearly 30 percent to world GDP growth," Chen Yulu, deputy governor of the People's Bank of China (PBOC), said in a statement to a meeting of the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC) on the sidelines of the ongoing Spring Meetings of the IMF and the World Bank in Washington.
"The Chinese economy has been generally stable, and progress has been made continuously in improving and upgrading the economic structure," Chen said in the statement, which was posted to the IMF's website on Saturday.
The deputy central bank governor said China's growth has "placed greater emphasis on quality" and "become more balanced," as domestic consumption "played a greater role" in promoting growth. The stock market, which has seen a slack in the past few years, is also "showing signs of bottoming out and recovering", according to Chen.
Foreign portfolio investment into China reached a record high of 120 billion U.S. dollars last year, as international institutional investors diversified their portfolio investment and China further opened up the bond market and stock market, he said.
"With RMB-denominated assets increasingly included into global indexes, the potential for foreign portfolio investment inflows is growing," he argued.
The deputy central bank governor also said China will continue to implement prudent monetary policy and proactive fiscal policy this year.
"Prudent monetary policy will be neutral in general," he said. "Growth of M2 and aggregate social financing will be commensurate with that of nominal GDP growth, to better serve the goal of maintaining economic growth within an appropriate range."
Meanwhile, China will pursue a proactive fiscal policy with greater intensity and enhance its performance, focusing on cutting taxes and fees on a larger scale, said the official.
The IMF on Tuesday revised up the 2019 growth projection for China to 6.3 percent, up 0.1 percentage point from its previous estimation in January, according to the newly released April 2019 World Economic Outlook.
Changyong Rhee, director of the IMF's Asia and Pacific department, told Xinhua that the upward revision reflected the combined impact of recent developments in the China-U.S. trade talks, China's stronger-than-expected expansionary fiscal policy, and a slowing global economy.
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