Promote steady growth of foreign trade and drive sustained economic recovery

The State Council's executive meeting on November 8 passed the "Several Policy Measures on Promoting Stable Growth of Foreign Trade", emphasizing the need to make every effort to ensure stable growth of foreign trade to strongly support the steady recovery of the economy.

According to data released by the General Administration of Customs on the 7th, my country's total import and export of goods in the first ten months of this year reached 36.02 trillion yuan, up 5.2% year-on-year. Although the cumulative growth rate dropped slightly by 0.1 percentage point from the first three quarters, it showed a steady growth trend overall.

Chen Hongna, deputy researcher of the Foreign Economic Research Department of the Development Research Center of the State Council, believes that foreign trade, as one of the "three horses" driving the economy, should upgrade and transform traditional industries through new quality productivity under the complex and changing internal and external environment, and accelerate the cultivation of new momentum for foreign trade to promote the recovery of my country's economy.

At present, my country's import and export scale continues to expand and the structure continues to optimize, but it also faces many challenges, such as some foreign trade enterprises facing pressures such as funds, exchange rates, and orders. Therefore, it is necessary to implement accurate policies and strategies to continuously escort the development of enterprises.

In this regard, the meeting decided to increase financial support, expand the scale and coverage of export credit insurance, make full use of policy loans for small and micro foreign trade enterprises, continuously improve financial services for foreign trade enterprises, optimize cross-border trade settlement methods, and improve enterprises' ability to cope with exchange rate fluctuations.

In addition, the meeting encouraged the development of cross-border e-commerce and promoted the construction of overseas smart logistics platforms; strengthened service guarantees for foreign trade enterprises, promoted the innovative development of green trade, border trade, and bonded maintenance, improved foreign trade shipping guarantees, and increased support for foreign trade enterprises to reduce burdens and stabilize jobs.

Recently, a number of measures have been implemented: the Ministry of Commerce and nine other departments jointly issued the "Opinions on Expanding Cross-border E-commerce Exports and Promoting Overseas Warehouse Construction", aiming to solve the difficulties in the development of cross-border e-commerce; the General Administration of Customs has formulated 59 specific measures around four key tasks, including further supporting the construction of a new highland of institutional opening, continuously promoting policy innovation and regulatory reform of comprehensive bonded areas, and optimizing the innovation mechanism of customs supervision system in free trade pilot zones.

Experts predict that in the future, all regions and departments will fully implement various policies and measures to promote the high-end, intelligent and green development of foreign trade, deepen the scope of regional cooperation, and at the same time strive to create new foreign trade competitive advantages with technology, brand, quality and service as the core, to ensure excellent results in foreign trade throughout the year.