Analysis: A $1 trillion headache: China’s local fiscal shortfall poses broader

BEIJING, Oct 17 (Reuters) – By any account, $1 trillion seems huge. That’s the scale of budget shortfalls facing Chinese provinces, reducing their fiscal firepower to fund infrastructure spending and tax cuts, and raising risks for the world’s second-biggest economy in 2023.

The timing couldn’t be worse for policymakers in Beijing, as the economy wobbles under the weight of global recession risks, surging commodity costs, rising geopolitical tension and widespread COVID-19 lockdowns at home – spoiling the backdrop of a once-in-five-years congress of the ruling Communist Party that got underway on Sunday.

Local governments have long been a pump-primer of China’s growth, but declining state land sales revenue in the wake of an ongoing crackdown on debt in the sector has severely eroded their financial power – a situation exacerbated this year by China’s feeble growth, weak tax income and crippling COVID restrictions. read more

Local governments must also make debt payments in coming months, portending more financial pain and limiting their ability to meet Beijing’s requests to boost spending. Already, many of them have resorted to cutting salaries, reducing headcounts, lowering subsidies and even imposing disproportionately hefty fines to meet budget shortfalls.

In the first eight months, China’s 31 provincial-level regions reported a gap between general public revenue and expenditure totalling 6.74 trillion yuan ($948 billion). That’s the widest for the period since at least 2012, Reuters calculations from local government data in the past decade showed, with the populous provinces of Sichuan, Henan, Hunan and Guangdong suffering the largest shortfalls.

In the same period, government land sales, counted separately, tumbled 28.5% year-on-year to 3.37 trillion yuan, adding urgency to the need to restore the financial health of indebted real estate firms.

“With the slower growth this year, we expect fiscal deficits for regional and local governments will remain substantial, reflecting the property slowdown and lingering effects of the coronavirus shock,” said Jennifer A. Wong, analyst at Moody’s, which expects 2022 economic growth to slow to 3.5% from 8.1% in 2021.

In the past, shortfalls were largely offset by transfer payments from the central government and carryover funds from previous years, but analysts say cooling economic growth may limit any such help this time around.

Policymakers will also be wary of picking up the fiscal slack with large-scale monetary stimulus as a wave of global interest rate hikes to rein in red-hot inflation has sent U.S. bond yields soaring, widening the yield gap between U.S. and Chinese debt.

DEBT STRESS

Treasury bond quotas could be increased, so that some of them could be transferred to local governments to ease their fiscal stress, said Luo Zhiheng, chief macroeconomic analyst at Yuekai Securities.

However, they face a…