MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

China's finance minister visits Argentina ahead of G20: meeting with Macri

Macri and Xiao discussed bilateral cooperation and China’s “One Belt, One Road” infrastructure project involving more than 68 countries and 40% of global GDP

Chinese Finance Minister Xiao Jie, visited Argentina last week where he met with president Mauricio Macri and other officials ahead of the upcoming meeting in Buenos Aires of the G20 finance ministers and central banks governors. There was no official briefing of the different meetings or the interview with Macri in Casa Rosada.

 Before the interview with Macri, Xiao Jie met with Finance minister Nicolas Dujovne and central bank members.

The ministers and governors meeting of G20 is scheduled for March while the summit will take place at the end of the year. Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, the three largest economies of Latin America are members of the Group of 20, of leading industrial countries and emerging economies.

Minister Dujovne pledged that Argentina is working along the lines of the issues which G20 is shouldering, trends of the labor market and infrastructure development. Buenos Aires currently holds the presidency of G20 and Buenos Aires will host the end of 2018 summit. Previous summits took place in China (2016) and Germany (2017).

According to government sources Macri and Xiao also discussed bilateral cooperation and China’s “One Belt, One Road” infrastructure project involving more than 68 countries with 4.4 billion people and up to 40% of the world’s GDP. China is Argentina's leading global trade partner, and is financing several infrastructure projects involving billions of dollars in energy and transport.

Xiao underlined that Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Macri have met three times in the last two years which is a clear signal of the importance of the bilateral relation. The minister said that China and Argentina are promoting free trade, facilitating investments and share the significance of development in emerging economies. Thus “the need to reinforce financial and economic cooperation to ensure sustained development”.

Macri said Argentina was interested in deepening the good bilateral relations and cooperation with China, in most fields, finance, taxes, trade, economic projects.