CHINA: GENERAL METADATA

Data documentation

General notes

China’s publically available budget data lack the specificity of many OECD countries. Where available, figures provided as part of the official budget cycle typically group expenses at the highest level for overall categories, while estimates of the revenue foregone due to tax expenditures are rarely provided.

Official announcements, especially those related to overall programme budgets, are often made via reports issued by official news agencies of the People’s Central Government (Xinhua, CCTV) or the Chinese Communist Party (People’s Daily). Media sources (Caixin, Caijing and other financial websites) also occasionally reveal budget support levels or estimates of tax expenditures. The sources are typically the Central Government or relevant ministries, firms themselves, or top company officials. News sources will also occasionally compare these statements with other official documents they were able to obtain in order to arrive at broader estimates. These documents are often featured on official government websites of the Central People’s Government or the Ministry of Finance (MOF). Sources are clearly stated in this database, including whether the amounts have been initially provided or subsequently cited by government websites or by official media sources.

The same caveats apply to amounts listed as "government grants" (in English-language reports) or either "government support" or "subsidies" (in Chinese-language reports), notably in the annual reports that state energy firms provide to major stock markets (Shanghai; Hong-Kong, China; and New York) as part of their disclosure requirements for listed subsidiaries. Sometimes these numbers specify the source and use of funds, but they are rarely as specific as would be preferred in order to fully allocate the amounts of stated subsidies to the measures listed below or other relevant programmes.

Estimates for budgetary support and tax expenditures are allocated to the various support categories and programmes to the best extent possible given available information. In view of the limited availability of the data, assumptions are sometimes necessary to assess the allocation and, in some cases, the amount of support. Those assumptions are clearly stated where applicable.

Methodological note

A large part of support to fossil fuels in non-OECD countries (and in a few member countries such as Mexico) takes the form of price controls or regulations benefitting final consumers. In many cases, this occurs through the government mandating state-owned oil and gas companies to charge lower retail prices, thereby lowering the revenues these companies collect through sales of fuel. This often results in the government subsequently intervening to compensate state-owned oil and gas companies for the losses they incurred in the downstream sector due to the regulated prices, with this compensation taking many forms. Some governments choose, for example, to compensate national oil and gas companies through targeted tax concessions (e.g., VAT exemptions) or equity injections.

This inventory focusses on the direct budgetary transfers and tax expenditures that encourage the production or consumption of fossil fuels, including those benefitting national oil and gas companies. For this reason, some of the measures classified here under "Producer Support Estimate" may have been introduced by governments with a view to compensating domestic, vertically integrated oil and gas companies for the lower prices they are required to charge at the retail level, resulting in these measures being connected to some extent to consumer support.

Estimates of the support directly conferred to final consumers by regulated prices are available from the International Energy Agency (IEA), which estimates these induced transfers as part of its annual World Energy Outlook publication. Readers are therefore advised not to add together the OECD and IEA estimates given the significant risk of overlap and double-counting this involves.