CHANGE? China vows to ‘vigorously boost consumption’ to revive weak economy.
Financial authorities in Beijing on Sunday released a 30-point “special action plan” with priorities including boosting incomes, halting the fall of property prices, stabilizing the stock market and providing child-care subsidies. They ordered local governments to “expand domestic demand in all directions.”
“There is still a lot of work to be done to boost consumption, expand domestic demand and better meet the people’s needs for a better life,” Li Chunlin, vice chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, the government agency in charge of economic planning, said at a news conference Monday.
Analysts said the plan was light on specifics and will do little to fix China’s bigger problems. “The basic takeaway is that these are very incremental and limited steps,” said Logan Wright, a partner at Rhodium Group, a research group focused on China’s economy.
Wright said the bigger risks for the country are persistent deflation, unemployment and low household income. “These are structural problems that are not easily solved with a few subsidies here and there,” he said.
Beijing has been promising to boost consumer spending for at least a decade but little has ever come from those promises. People would much rather save than spend in authoritarian countries.