Sept 17, 2013
Translated by Zhu Na

The pace at which China's central and local government's are spending money has slowed consecutively over the past three months, according to the calculations of a financial information website run by Shanghai DZH.

Fiscal spending by both local and central governments came to 7.87 trillion yuan over the first eight months of this year, according to data released by the Ministry of Finance last week.

Although the ministry does not release monthly data on outlays, according to calculations by AAstocks.com, a financial website, the pace at which spending is expanding has slowed over the past three months.

Fiscal spending grew by 6.5 percent in August to about 960 billion yuan, 5.2 percentage points slower than the 11.7 percent growth registered in August 2012, according to an estimate made by Shanghai DZH.

This follows a slowing of the pace of growth in June and July.

An expert from The Ministry of Finance's research institute says that a 5 percent cut across the board on all administrative spending might have contributed to the slow down in the pace of growth. In addition, he also noted that government investments are also not growing as quickly as in 2012.

"According to the current scale of fiscal spending, there is still room for continuing to reduce the amount of outlays," said Ni Hongri (倪红日), a researcher from the State Council's Development Research Center.

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Sina Finance: 财政支出增速连续三月下降 政府投资项目开工量减少