China has been furiously boosting quotas to encourage foreign investment flows over the past year. But it might struggle to fill them. After all, investing in China is not a promise of riches. And foreign investors must also wonder why the Chinese themselves are so keen to get their money out.
In January, Guo Shuqing, head of China’s securities regulator said that quotas which allowed foreign qualified institutional investors to invest both dollar-denominated and offshore renminbi-denominated funds in China’s bond and equity markets could be increased as much as ten fold.
Yet still only half of China’s $80bn inbound quota, for example, has been allocated. It does not help that China’s equity market has proved itself to be a bad proxy for China’s economic growth. The Shanghai Composite Index has halved over the past five years, when growth in economic output averaged 9 per cent and the S&P 500 gained almost a sixth.