The International Monetary Fund will “be significantly reducing” its medium-term outlook for China’s current account surplus, according to people familiar with the matter, a move that will give Beijing ammunition against critics who say that it keeps the renminbi artificially cheap to support its exporters.
China’s once-mammoth trade surplus is shrinking more quickly than expected as domestic demand grows and this will prompt the IMF to recognise that the economy is better balanced than in the past.
A change in the IMF’s forecast “would certainly erode the analytical underpinning for the case that the renminbi is substantially undervalued”, said Eswar Prasad, a former senior IMF official in China who is now a Brookings Institution scholar.