Renminbi reform 'did not disrupt economy'
By Zhang Dingmin (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-02-22 06:30

China's exchange rate reform launched last year has not disrupted the economic stability as some worried, the country's central bank said yesterday.

The widely watched reform has also helped weaken expectations for further appreciation of the Chinese currency, renminbi, the People's Bank of China (PBOC) said in its 2005 fourth-quarter monetary policy report released yesterday.

The central bank also pledged to further improve the managed floating exchange rate regime of renminbi.

This will include continuing construction of the foreign exchange market and launching more risk-hedging financial products.

"Thanks to the property scope and timing of the initial adjustments of the renminbi exchange rate, on a microscopic level, various import and export enterprises adapted fairly well to the new renminbi exchange rate formation mechanism," the central bank said.

On a macro level, the bank said the national economy maintained the trend of stable and relatively rapid growth after the exchange rate formation reform.

"[This] demonstrated that years of reform and opening up and construction of socialistic market reform has noticeably improved the vitality of the Chinese economy and its resilience to reform and external shocks," it said.

China reformed its decade-old exchange rate policy on July 21 last year, allowing the currency to appreciate by 2 per cent against the US dollar and linking it to a basket of foreign currencies instead of the US dollar alone.

The move followed months of speculation that the renminbi would appreciate, as was demanded by trading partners like the United States who complained the currency was undervalued to give Chinese exports an unfair competitive edge.

Such speculation fuelled the inflows of foreign currencies, which, consequently, drove up China's foreign-exchange (forex) reserves as the central bank bought excess dollars to enforce the renminbi-trading band.

This also complicated monetary policy operations by forcing new issuance of local currency into the banking system.

The July reform, followed by additional moves in past months, soothed expectations for further renminbi appreciation.

That is reflected in a shift to net sales of renminbi forward contracts from net purchase, as well as the slower pace of forex inflows, the bank noted.

China's forex reserves rose by 34.3 per cent on a year-on-year basis to US$818.9 billion at the end of last year, which was 17 percentage points slower than a year earlier.

And although a stronger renminbi pushed up prices of Chinese exports, local exporters continue to see their sales growing, the bank said.

According to a survey the central bank conducted last November, among 1,113 foreign trade companies, 84.8 per cent of them increased or kept unchanged export prices.

But as many as 72.9 per cent of the companies surveyed reported annualized increases in exports for that month or same growth pace from a year earlier.

A total of 16.2 per cent saw their exports rise by more than 10 per cent on a year-on-year basis.

The low labour cost is seen as a major force behind the competitiveness of Chinese exports.

A separate survey by the central bank indicated local businesses were increasingly resorting to new financial products, such as renminbi forward and forex swap, to hedge risks from the new exchange rate regime.

The uninterrupted momentum of foreign trade was also evident last month, when export growth rebounded sharply to 28.2 per cent on a year-on-year basis from 18.2 per cent in the previous month.

But China's massive trade surplus, which stood at US$114 billion with the United States last year, risks growing pressures from its trading partners and complicating the implementation of domestic monetary policy, warned Lehman Brothers.

"US protectionist pressures against China are simmering and could easily soon intensify," the investment bank said in a weekly economic news source, noting the US Treasury has been talking to Wall Street firms about the potential financial market impact if it were to brand China as a currency manipulator in its semi-annual report on exchange rates to be released on April 15.

(China Daily 02/22/2006 page9)