Beijing November 22, 2013 (Xinhua): Premier Li Keqiang recently signed the Decree of the State Council promulgating the revised Measures for the Collection of Statistics and the Declaration of the Balance of Payments, which will be implemented as of January 1, 2014.

Statistical data on the balance of payments are are flection of the external economic position of a country and an important basis for macro-economic decision-making. In 1995, with the approval of the State Council, the People’s Bank of China promulgated the Measures for the Collection of Statistics and the Declaration of the Balance of Payments, providing a mechanism for fully grasping China's international balance-of-payments situation. During recent years, as the scale of balance-of-payments transactions has constantly expanded, the content, type, and modes of transactions have become increasingly diversified. In 2008the IMF released the sixth edition of itsBalance of Payments and International Investment Position Manualas the universal standard for the compilation of statistical statements on the balance of payments. The new edition instituted many revisions, including with respect to the statistical principles, the current account, and the financial account, and it adopted higher standards for the collection of the statistical data and the methods for declaring the balance of payments.

In order to further increase the comparability of the relevant data across countries, the new edition prescribed that “all economic transactions between Chinese and non-Chinese residents and external financial assets and liabilities of Chinese residents shall be subject to the statistics and the declaration of the balance of payments.” As stipulated in the previous measures, all economic transactions (flows) between Chinese and non-Chinese residents shall be subject to the statistics and the declaration of the balance of payments, with the exclusion of the external financial assets and liabilities (stock) of Chinese residents.

According to the previous measures, Chinese residents who carry out transactions with non-Chinese residents through domestic financial institutions shall declare the content of the transactions through the financial institutions to the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) or its branches/sub-branches. Financial institutions within the territory of China shall declare their own external business directly to the SAFE or its branches/sub-branches (including their external assets, liabilities, and their variations), and shall fulfill the obligations in their role as an intermediary through which Chinese residents declare their statistics and the balance of payments to the relevant authorities. Given that the data on the external financial assets and liabilities of Chinese residents cannot be fully acquired through financial institutions, the stipulation that “Chinese residents who have external financial assets and liabilities shall declare the relevant information regarding their external financial assets and liabilities in accordance with the relevant regulations of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange” will supplement the new measures.

Given that it has become common practice that non-residents are treated as the entity for the statistics and the declaration of the balance of payments, the new measures incorporate non-Chinese residents with economic transactions within the territory of China into the scope of the declaration entities, with the stipulation that “Chinese residents and non-Chinese residents carrying out economic transactions within the territory of China shall declare the information on the balance of payments in compliance with the relevant regulations in a timely, accurate, and complete manner.”