China praises FTSE move to include A-shares in global benchmarks

BEIJING - China praised global index provider FTSE's move to launch two transitional indexes to include A-shares in the benchmarks, the country's securities regulator said, pledging further measures to ease overseas capital flows to the stock market.

FTSE, a London-based global index provider, announced on Tuesday it started the transition to include China A-shares in its global benchmarks with the launch of two transitional indexes for Emerging Markets.

According to the announcement, the two new Emerging Markets indexes include China A-Shares at a weighting equivalent to total allocations under the Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors (QFII) and RMB-denominated Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors (RQFII) programs. The initial weighting of China A-Shares in the FTSE Emerging inclusion indexes will be approximately 5 percent, FTSE said.

"This is an important step forward for the inclusion of A-shares in global benchmarks," the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) said in a press briefing on Friday.

The CSRC said it will keep close communications with the global index providers to increase their confidence in China's capital market.

The comments came as another index provider, the US-based MSCI, is also considering whether to include A-shares in its benchmarks.

The proposal for inclusion was rejected last year due to too many investment constraints as China's capital account, which covers portfolio investment and borrowing, is still largely controlled by the state over concerns of abrupt capital flows in and out of the country.

To gradually open the capital market, the government introduced the QFII and RQFII programs in 2003 and 2011 respectively. They give foreign investors the right to move quotas of money into the account to encourage controllable flows.

Since then, steady progress has been made. As of April 29, overseas institutions had received QFII quotas amounting to $73.62 billion, and the volume under the RQFII scheme totalled 363.7 billion yuan.

The MSCI is due to publish its decision on June 10.