Slow growth continues for China's fiscal revenue

BEIJING -- China's fiscal revenue continued a trend of slow growth in May due to tempered economic expansion and the country's tax cutting policies, according to official data released on Sunday.

Total fiscal revenue grew 6.2 percent year on year to 1.27 trillion yuan ($204.84 billion) in May, the Ministry of Finance (MOF) said in a statement.

The growth rate was slightly up from the 6.1 percent growth seen in April, data showed.

The central government's fiscal revenue rose by 2.6 percent year on year to 717 billion yuan, the first monthly growth since March but it would be difficult to achieve the full-year target of 7 percent, the statement said.

It added that local governments saw fiscal revenue expand 11.3 percent last month to 557.9 billion yuan.

In the first five months of 2013, the country's fiscal revenue expanded by 6.6 percent from a year earlier to 5.62 trillion yuan. The pace was 6.1 percentage points lower than the same period of last year, the MOF said.

The statement said slow fiscal revenue growth was not only due to the country's slow economic expansion, but also the government's policies of structural tax reductions.

China's gross domestic product (GDP) growth slowed to 7.7 percent in the first quarter from 7.9 percent recorded during the final three months of 2012, National Bureau of Statistics data showed.

Since the beginning of last year, China has adopted a raft of tax-cutting measures, including a pilot program to replace business tax with value-added tax (VAT), to help alleviate burdens for businesses and individuals and serve the country's economic restructuring.

With regard to the increase of local governments' fiscal revenue, Bai Jingming, deputy director of the Research Institute for Fiscal Science under the MOF, said it was driven by sharp increases in housing transactions that drove up local tax revenues.

Fiscal revenue in China includes taxes, administrative fees and other government income, including fines and earnings from state-owned assets.

In 2012, China's fiscal revenue saw an increase of 12.8 percent.

The statement also said the country's fiscal spending climbed 12 percent year on year to 1.03 trillion yuan in May.