Cooperation between China and the Central and Eastern European countries, and the expansion of economic relations are set to produce indisputable advantages of all participants, Minister for National Economy Mihály Varga pointed out at the roundtable discussion organized by the SINO-CEEF Fund in Budapest.

In his keynote speech the Minister said that it was in Hungary’s best interest, being a country with an open economy and part of the CEE region that had become Europe’s growth engine, to widen international cooperation in general and relations with China in particular.

“According to expert opinion, which has been gaining more and more recognition, the global economy is currently in a “low growth trap”. The governments of individual countries may best tackle this problem if they pursue pro-growth economic policies. Hungary, the Hungarian Government, implemented these measures already a couple of years ago”, he noted. “In 2010, we concurrently introduced a prudent fiscal policy, thanks to which the country’s state budget deficit has been under 3 percent of GDP in recent years; we transformed our tax regime and turned it into an instrument that helps boost economic, investment and job growth; and we have placed the government debt-to-GDP ratio on a descending path. The performance of our economy has verified the adequacy of these measures. Following the positive economic U-turn of 2013, Hungary’s GDP has grown dynamically, and the number of jobless people has slumped from 11.6 percent in 2010 to 4.1 percent by now,” the Minister stated.

“As Hungary is a country with an open economy, foreign trade is a major determinant of our development. Naturally, Hungary’s number one foreign trade partner is the European Union. However, thanks to our “Opening to the East” policy, the region covered by the policy has become our most significant non-EU market. In line with that, the foreign trade turnover between China and Hungary has been rising dynamically: the value of bilateral trade was more than USD 7.1bn in 2016, and this constitutes an increase of 8.2 percent compared to the year 2015,” Mihály Varga said at the conference where participants included SINO-CEEF Fund Chairman Jiang Jianqing and Briton’s former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, currently the organization’s chief advisor.

The Minister added that Chinese-Hungarian financial relations had also been growing stronger steadily: as he stressed, the activities of the Bank of China, China’s Eximbank and the Chinese Development Bank in the CEE region and Hungary were good examples to follow.

(Ministry for National Economy)