Following two consecutive State Council executive meetings in late September that focused on stabilizing foreign trade, the State Council once again unveiled favorable measures for foreign trade on the 8th. This time, the deployment focused on improving export tax rebate policies and accelerating the progress of tax rebates.
The State Council executive meeting held on the same day decided that starting from November 1, 2018, in accordance with the principle of structural adjustment and with reference to common international practices, the current export tax rebate rate for goods is 15% and some 13% will be raised to 16%; 9% will be raised to 10%, some of which will be raised to 13%; 5% will be raised to 6%, and some will be raised to 10%. The tax rebate rate has been reduced from the original seven levels to five levels.
The meeting also determined that in order to further speed up the progress of tax refunds, the procedures for export enterprises with high credit ratings and good tax records will be simplified, the tax refund time will be shortened, paperless tax refund declarations will be fully implemented, and the efficiency of tax refund review will be improved. Optimize tax refund services, help enterprises collect documents in a timely manner to declare tax refunds, and achieve full online coverage of electronic refunds as soon as possible. Comprehensive foreign trade service enterprises are encouraged to provide tax refund services for small and medium-sized enterprises.
The meeting made it clear that the average time for processing tax refunds will be shortened from the current 13 working days to 10 working days before the end of this year.
“Funds are costs, and time is also a cost.” Lao Guoling, director of the E-Commerce Research Center of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, believes that from compressing customs clearance time, simplifying customs clearance procedures, to improving export tax rebate policies to speed up export tax rebates, this is an overall reduction in customs clearance A set of cost-effective combinations is a great benefit for foreign trade companies, especially small and medium-sized enterprises.
In her view, by optimizing tax refund services and achieving electronic network coverage, the level of multi-sector data sharing will be further improved, creating a more “sunshine” regulatory environment for cross-border e-commerce exports and other fields.
Zhuang Rui, deputy dean of the Institute of International Economics at the University of International Business and Economics, noted that this meeting made it clear that the export tax rebate rate for products with high energy consumption, high pollution, resource-based products and products facing overcapacity reduction tasks will remain unchanged.
“This is conducive to deepening the supply-side structural reform, promoting the optimization of structure, transformation and upgrading of Chinese enterprises, and better moving from quantitative growth to quality development.” She said.
Observing the past three executive meetings of the State Council, it is not difficult to find that whether it is reducing the number of regulatory documents that need to be verified in the import and export links from 86 to 48, or reducing the import tariff rates for 1,585 tax items of industrial products and other commodities, or the latest introduction of The core essence of the new export tax rebate policy is to reduce the burden on enterprises and maintain stable growth of foreign trade.
Zhang Yansheng, chief researcher of the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, believes that since the beginning of this year, our country has proactively launched a series of practical and positive measures for foreign trade based on its own economic development needs. This is not only conducive to achieving a higher level of opening up to the outside world, but also for the healthy development of global trade. Inject a stream of warmth. (Title: Stabilize foreign trade and take practical measures to welcome the benefits of export tax rebates)
