The Report shows that the total amount of cross-border payments and receipts settled in RMB reached a record high.
On 26 Sept. 2022, the People’s Bank of China published the “2022 RMB Internationalization Report” (hereinafter the “Report”, 2022年人民币国际化报告).
The Report focuses on the international use of RMB, the offshore RMB market, and the prospect of RMB internationalization.
According to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), RMB overtook the Japanese yen to become the fourth global payment currency by value in December 2021, with a share up to 2.7%, which continuously climbed to a historical high point at 3.2% in January 2022.
According to the data on the Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves
(COFER) released by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), RMB accounted for 2.88% of global foreign exchange reserves in the first quarter of 2022, up 1.8 percentage points from 2016 when it first entered the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR) basket, ranking fifth among major reserve currencies.
In May 2022, IMF increased RMB’s share in SDR from 10.92% to 12.28%, reflecting a growing recognition worldwide of the improvement in the free use of RMB.
The Report demonstrates that the amount of cross-border RMB settlements related to the real economy maintains a rapid growth. Business areas such as commodities and cross-border e-commerce have become a new pillar of growth, and two-way cross-border investment remains active.
Cover Photo by 炫铭 on Unsplash
Contributors: Meng Yu 余萌