China's fiscal revenue continues slow growth

China's fiscal revenue continued a trend of slow growth in April partly due to tempered economic growth and the country's tax cut policies, according to official data released on Monday.

Total fiscal revenue grew 6.1 percent year on year to 1.14 trillion yuan (183.66 billion U.S. dollars) in April, the Ministry of Finance (MOF) said in a statement posted on its website.

The growth rate was down from the 6.9 percent growth seen in last April and stayed at the same level as that recorded in March, the data showed.

The central government's fiscal revenue dropped by 2.2 percent year on year to 535.7 billion yuan due to the slight growth of corporate income tax, a decline in import-related taxes, as well as the high base number of last April, the statement said.

It added that local governments saw fiscal revenue expand 14.7 percent last month to 607.4 billion yuan on the back of sharp increases in housing transactions that drove up local tax revenues.

Bai Jingming, deputy director of the Research Institute for Fiscal Science under the MOF, said slow fiscal revenue growth was not only due to the country's slow economic expansion, but also the government's policies of structural tax reductions.

China's gross domestic product (GDP) growth slowed to 7.7 percent in the first quarter from 7.9 percent recorded during the final three months of 2012, National Bureau of Statistics data showed.

Since the beginning of last year, China has adopted a raft of tax-cutting measures, including a pilot program to replace business tax with value-added tax (VAT), to help alleviate tax burdens for businesses and individuals and serve the country's economic restructuring.

In the first four months of 2013, the country's fiscal revenue expanded by 6.7 percent from a year earlier to 4.35 trillion yuan. The pace was 5.8 percentage points lower than the same period of last year, the MOF said.

In 2012, China's fiscal revenue saw an increase of 12.8 percent.

Fiscal revenue in China includes taxes, administrative fees and other government income, including fines and earnings from state-owned assets.

The ministry also said the country's fiscal spending climbed 18 percent year on year to 930.8 billion yuan in April.

Central government spending rose 10.5 percent while that of local government went up 19.7 percent year on year, it said.