China to increase imports of high-quality services, MOC

China's Ministry of Commerce (MOC) will take multiple measures to further promote the imports of high-quality services, Chen Chunjiang, director with the Department of Trade in Services and Commercial Services under the MOC said at the press conference held on last Friday during the third China International Import Expo (CIIE) for the release of a report on China's service imports.

The report pointed out that despite the temporary impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on China's economy, the country's long-term goal to import services remained unchanged. In the next five years, China's service imports are expected to grow faster than the global average and reach 2.5 trillion U.S. dollars, accounting for more than ten percent of the world's total.

Specifically, the country's outbound travel spending is expected to exceed one trillion U.S. dollars in the next five years, while its total imports of digital services such as information services, financial services, insurance services and other business services are likely to exceed 1.3 trillion U.S. dollars, according to the report.

To expand the imports of high-quality services, the MOC will continue to advance the construction of pilot platforms for innovative development of service trade, promote the cancellation or relaxation of restrictions on cross-border service trade, implement pre-access national treatment plus negative list management systems, improve the management system of negative list for cross-border service trade, and continue to optimize the environment for conducting service trade, stated Chen.

In order to reduce restrictions on service imports, China will trim the catalogue of technologies prohibited or restricted from import, which was published in 2001 and revised in 2007, to create a favorable environment for the free flow of technology elements.

China's service imports increased from 281.3 billion U.S. dollars in 2012 to 500.68 billion U.S. dollars in 2019, with an average annual growth rate of 8.6 percent and its proportion in global service imports rising from 6.3 percent to 8.6 percent, showed the report.

The country's service imports from countries and regions participating in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) have been growing in recent years, up from 66.87 billion U.S. dollars in 2017 to 79.82 billion U.S. dollars in 2019, according to the report.