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Vice mayor hails free trade zone progress
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SHANGHAI’S pilot free trade zone has made significant progress in facilitating trade, boosting investment and promoting financial opening-up, city officials said yesterday, ahead of its first anniversary on Monday.
Ai Baojun, vice mayor of Shanghai and head of the China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone Administration, told reporters the zone had “achieved institutional innovations in foreign investment management, trade facilitation, financial deregulation and government role transformation.”
Ai said there had been an increase in foreign investment in the zone since a negative list of off-limit areas for foreign investors was revised earlier to eliminate a quarter of items that were closed to foreigners.
By September 15, 1,677 foreign-funded firms accounted for 13.7 percent of the 12,266 newly-established enterprises in the zone, he said, and 283 projects had settled in the zone after the introduction of 23 measures designed to open up its services sector to foreign investment.
In terms of trade, the city’s Customs watchdog, along with the inspection and quarantine and maritime authorities, had adopted more than 60 measures to help cut logistic and warehouse costs by an average 10 percent and reduce Customs clearance time.
In response to complaints about slow progress in financial reform, Ai said there had been great improvements in terms of interest rate liberalization, capital account opening-up and yuan internationalization, but this was far from enough.
During the past year, there had been efforts to ease controls on foreign exchange settlement for companies in the zone, such as cutting red tape and lifting restrictions on the amount of settlement. Financial services such as cross-border yuan payment, cross-border yuan financing and cross-border yuan cash pooling for multinationals were also set up in the zone.
In the first eight months of this year, cross-border yuan settlement in the zone reached 156.3 billion yuan (US$25.5 billion), 15 percent of the city’s total. During the same period, yuan funds borrowed from overseas markets totaled 17.4 billion yuan and funds of 27.2 billion yuan were transferred through cash pooling.
The zone also set up a separate accounting system to manage risks in financial opening-up. As of September 21, 10 Chinese banks had been authorized to open 4,110 free trade accounts.
Zheng Yang, director of the Shanghai Financial Service Office, said oil futures trading would be launched later this year, as part of a bid to build a financial trading platform for international investors.
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