BEIJING, Aug. 22 (Xinhua) -- Since 2016, China has unveiled a batch of policies to reduce enterprises' cost burden, including tax and fee reduction measures. The country is mulling reduction of value-added tax (VAT) rate on manufacturing industry, reported the Xinhua-run newspaper Economic Information Daily on August 22.
Nationwide, the country expects the transition from business tax (BT) to VAT to save enterprises 500 billion yuan (74.9 billion U.S. dollars) in 2016, the State Administration of Taxation estimated.
In fact, manufacturing enterprises have been appealing for cutting VAT rate for a long time. A survey made in 2015 showed that over 80 percent of the total enterprise respondents called for tax reduction.
Jiang Zhen, an associate researcher with the National Academy of Economic Strategy of China Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), noted that heavy turnover tax burden makes it difficult for enterprises to seek innovation and also hard for the country to realize innovation-driven development strategy.
He added that China has a long way to deepen the VAT reform. Currently, there is a big gap between VAT rate on service industry and that on manufacturing industry. It is a good practice to cut VAT rate on the latter. (Edited by Zhang Yuan, zhangyuan11@xinhua.org)
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