Flexible intellectual property will help China to diffuse trade tensions: IMF

After serving as IMF's Chief Economist for more than three years, 66-year-old Obstfeld is set to retire this month-end.

Flexible intellectual property and opening up more to foreign investment will help China diffuse its trade tensions and enhance Beijing’s economic stability, a top IMF official has said.

China and the US are currently engaged in a trade conflict and have slapped tit-for-tat tariffs of hundreds of billions of dollars on each other’s goods.

The hefty tariffs stem from the Trump administration’s demands that China makes sweeping changes to its intellectual property practices, rein in high-technology industrial subsidies, open its markets to more foreign competition and take steps to cut a USD 375 billion US goods trade surplus. “One of the big issues in the trade disputes between China and trading partners is this area of intellectual property. And reforming that regime is a big to-do for the global multilateral order,” IMF’s Chief Economist Maury Obstfeld told a group of journalists here on Sunday.