Policies will be ready this year to support overseas investment

The governor of the People's Bank of China released a time schedule on Sunday to make the country's currency more user-friendly as a step toward making international investments easier.

The reform aims to meet the International Monetary Fund's requirements before its evaluation on whether the yuan could be a part of Special Drawing Rights.

This means the yuan would join the US dollar, euro, pounds sterling and Japanese yen as part of the supplementary foreign exchange reserve maintained by the IMF.

"By the end of 2015, the last year of the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15), China plans to make the renminbi capital account convertible," said PBOC Governor Zhou Xiaochuan when he met chief executive officers from the world's top business groups at the China Development Forum in Beijing on Sunday.

Zhou said: "It is time to change the current policy that restrains Chinese individual residents from buying equity and financial products in overseas markets. Also the Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors plan is not flexible enough to satisfy foreign residents' investment needs on the mainland.

"A set of pilot policies and regulations will be released this year, to basically achieve the requirements for a currency that can be used more easily."