(Yicai) Jan. 18 -- China’s high-quality development accelerated last year, according to data from the taxation system, the director general of the State Taxation Administration said.

Chinese companies made continuous efforts to hike investment in innovation, Huang Yun told Yicai today. Enterprises deducted CNY1.85 trillion (USD259.8 billion) worth of research and development expenses from their taxable income in the first three quarters of last year, up 13.6 percent from a year earlier. Manufacturing firms benefited the most from the preferential tax policies, as the amount they deducted accounted for 58.9 percent of the total.

Companies’ sales revenue from high-tech industries jumped 9.8 percent last year from the previous year, with the percentage to the national total up 0.5 percentage point in the period, Huang noted, citing value-added tax invoice statistics. These figures indicate that innovation industries have been doing a great job in recent years, he added.

The integration of the digital economy and real economy also accelerated, according to Huang. The sales revenue of companies engaged in core industries of the digital economy rose 8.7 percent last year from the previous one, up 2.1 percentage points from 2022, Huang said, adding that the number of digital technologies purchased by Chinese firms soared 10.1 percent in the period, up 3.2 percentage points from 2022.

This indicates the faster integration of the digital economy, and that the real economy advanced the progress of digital industrialization and industrial digitization, Huang pointed out.

In 2018, China implemented an incentive policy that temporarily exempts direct investment made by overseas investors with distributed profits from withholding taxes.

The amount of investment of overseas companies and investors that enjoyed such policy rose 0.8 percent to CNY141.1 billion (USD19.8 billion) last year from the year before, according to the latest income tax returns statistics. The figure exceeded CNY660 billion in the six years ended on Dec. 31.

China’s tax and fee income totaled CNY31.7 trillion (USD4.45 trillion) last year, of which CNY15.9 trillion were taxes and CNY8.2 trillion were social insurance premiums, according to the data released today by the State Taxation Administration.

Editor: Futura Costaglione