China can manage any debt crisis, says senior economist

China is capable of handling any debt crisis given its high savings rate and stabilizing leverage levels, said a senior economist at a forum held by the State Council's think tank on Saturday.

Compared with other major economies, China's current overall debt and leverage ratio situation is not "serious" and within a controllable rage, Li Yang, director of the National Institution for Finance and Development of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said during the Economic Summit of the 2018 China Development Forum.

The key measures that are expected in the coming months to lower the leverage levels include proper disposal of indebted and insolvent zombie firms through further improvement of the State-owned enterprise reform, control of the local government debts, reduction of nonperforming debts, tightening regulations on the asset management market, and control of broad money supply growth, Li said.

According to data from the National Institution for Finance and Development, China's macro leverage ratio went up by 2.5 percentage points in 2017, with an increase of 4.2 percentage points for the ratio in the household sector and a rise of 0.7 percentage points for the government leverage ratio (including local government leverage).

The institution calculated China's national balance sheet data, which showed that by the end of 2017, China's sovereign assets totaled 241.4 trillion yuan ($35.8 trillion) and sovereign liabilities totaled 139.8 trillion yuan, resulting in net assets amounting to 101.8 trillion yuan, a solid buffer for the country to protect itself from debt risks.