China's leaders lay out areas of economic emphasis for next three years

The annual Central Economic Work Conference, held in Beijing this week, determined that upcoming economic policy will concentrate especially on financial sector risks, pollution and poverty. While the conference themes certainly reflected topical Chinese issues, releases from the conference suggested few concrete measures to deal with these problems. As previously, the meeting participants stressed quality of growth, yet failed to announce the official end to numeric growth targets. The familiar themes of "proactive" fiscal policy and "prudent" monetary policy were reiterated, making it hard to say where economic policy is headed.