The finances of China’s local governments still remain heavily dependent upon revenues from land sales, which are on track to hit another record high in 2019.
The “October 2019 Financial Revenues and Expenditures Report” (2019年10月财政收支情况) released by the Ministry of Finance indicates that in the first ten months of 2019 China saw nationwide land transfer revenues of 5.07977 trillion yuan, for an increase of 6.9% compared to the reading of 4.7519 trillion yuan for the same period last year.
Nationwide land revenues have risen steadily in China since the end of the 1980’s, from an annual figure of just 40 billion yuan in 1995 to a record high of 6.5096 trillion yuan in 2018.
Figures from Centaline Group indicate that as of the end of November total land sales in 2019 in China’s first and second-tier cities exceeded three trillion yuan, as compared to 2.498 trillion yuan for the same period in 2018, for a you increase of 21%.
13 Chinese cities including the Zhejiang province capital of Hangzhou also saw land sale revenues in excess of 100 billion yuan, breaching a new record for the period.
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