Authorities should devise policies to ease companies' tax burden while slashing import duties on some consumer goods to boost domestic spending, an official said on Tuesday. [Special coverage]
Reducing taxes is in line with the government's supply-side reforms, which will help companies cut costs, said Huang Qifan, a deputy to the National People's Congress (NPC), the country's top legislature and also mayor of Southwest China's Chongqing, during a discussion held on Tuesday, according to domestic news website chinanews.com.
The current rebate ratio on the value-added tax on exports is about 13 percent, Huang noted.
"If the rate is increased by about 2 percentage points, it will save about 200 billion yuan ($30.7 billion) to 300 billion yuan for export enterprises," he said.
Adjusting export tax rebates has been a major focus of the government, and the policy was also highlighted in this year's Government Work Report, Hu Yijian, a professor at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
"However, it doesn't mean that the government will raise rebate rates for all products. For example, low-end products should be excluded," he noted.
The State Administration of Taxation has vowed to quicken the process of export tax rebates.
The government paid 656.5 billion yuan in export tax rebates during the first six months of 2015, up about 12.4 percent on a year-on-year basis, Reuters reported in August 2015.
"A further increase in tax rebates is also in line with the government's efforts to boost exports in 2016," Hu said.
Huang also suggested that more support measures should be launched to bring customers back to the domestic market.
"Chinese people have been contributing about 1 trillion yuan every year to foreign countries in recent years, as the same goods are much cheaper overseas than in China," Huang said.
