China holds economic meeting to map out

BEIJING: Chinese leaders began a key annual conference on Saturday to map out economic policies for next year, Xinhua news agency reported.

The Central Economic Work Conference, attended by senior officials from both central and local governments, will review China's stimulus measures over the past year and determine the parameters of policy for next year.

The ruling Communist Party's decision-making Politburo set the stage for the conference by declaring in late November that China would stick to its "proactive" fiscal setting and "moderately loose" monetary stance.

But the 25-member body said policy would be implemented flexibly. Economists generally take this to mean more active use of open-market operations by the central bank and more frequent tweaking of regulations to prevent the property market from overheating.

"We expect the key message from the (meeting) is to allow more room for policy fine-tuning in the future, with a possible bias towards using discretionary measures," Helen Qiao and Yu Song, two Goldman Sachs economists, said in a note to clients.