Press Release No. 19/128

IMF and China's Ministry of Finance Sign a New Agreement on Strengthening Fiscal Institutions

April 29, 2019

On April 24th, the IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde and China’s Finance Minister LIU Kun signed a new Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on technical cooperation and training to support China’s fiscal reforms, macro-fiscal issues, and priorities related to the Belt and Road Initiative.

The agreement builds on the already close collaboration between the IMF and Ministry of Finance. The agreement will provide further support to modernize Chinese fiscal institutions, which will play a critical role for China’s sustainable development.

The three-year agreement will focus on cooperation to strengthening government finance and public balance sheet statistics, as well as frameworks related to fiscal and debt sustainability analysis, improving fiscal relations between central and local governments, developing local government bond markets, designing tax policy and expenditure policy reforms, analyzing international tax spillovers, developing macro-fiscal frameworks and projections, and improving treasury management.