China should maintain prudent monetary policy

China should stick to its prudent monetary policy in the coming few years while instituting proactive fiscal measures to substantially promote economic structure reform, the China Securities Journal on Monday quoted a central bank official as saying. As the country maintains its moderately tight money supply, adopting a proactive fiscal policy is the key to the successful transformation of its economic structure, Xia Bin, a member of the central bank's monetary policy committee, said in the report. "Further, whether the government could keep to the moderately tight, or prudent monetary policy, depends on the support from fiscal measures," said Xia. According to the report, Xia suggested that the government have a more proactive fiscal policy while speeding up the reform of its fiscal spending structure. "Only by further improving its fiscal policy could the country achieve the economic structure transformation," Xia said. Also, the report quoted Xia as saying that the future monetary policy should focus on how to digest the existing 76 trillion yuan (about 11.74 trillion U.S. dollars) of money stock on the market, which will play an important role in stabilizing prices. "Future monetary policy should not be decided according to past experience," Xia said in the report, as effects of the reserve requirement ratio (RRR) and interest rate hikes may be offset by the expanding M2, the broad measure of money supply. Meanwhile, Xia urged the government to continue using open market operations and monetary tools such as RRR to rein in the "irrational" money growth, increasing the flexibility of the yuan's exchange rate, and gradually turning interest rates from negative to positive. To manage hot money influx, Xia advised the government to establish an unremunerated reserve requirement system and relevant tax levy regime that had already proved effective in other emerging economies.