Russian-Chinese financial cooperation: possibility of large-scale deepening

Today, Russia and China are the two largest developing economies in the world, and they are also comprehensive partners of each other, having close ties and cooperation in political, economic, energy and other fields. In recent years, Russia and China have achieved great results in financial cooperation, but in general the situation is still in its infancy. The large-scale deepening of Russian-Chinese financial cooperation is a common interest and an inevitable trend of the two countries. In this article, the authors first examined the current state of Russian-Chinese financial cooperation. It is established that the two countries have created a two-level mechanism of cooperation, opened several bank branches and representative offices, developed interbank correspondent relations and bilateral settlements in national currencies are developing rapidly, the share of national currencies in settlements between Russia and China in 2020 reached 25 %, and in 2013–2014 this share was negligible and amounted to about 2–3 %. The authors also use the SVAR model from the point of view of economic shock correlation to analyze the possibility of large-scale deepening of financial cooperation between Russia and China. It was found that the correlation coefficients of supply shock and demand shock between Russia and China did not exceed 0.2. It is believed that the two countries have basic conditions for financial cooperation, but currently there are no conditions for large-scale deepening of further cooperation in the financial sphere. In conclusion, the authors recommended deepening Russian-Chinese financial cooperation from the following aspects: 1. Improving the mechanism of financial cooperation. 2. Increasing the level of bilateral settlements in national currencies and promoting the internationalization of the ruble and yuan. 3. Improving the level of banking services and introducing innovations in financial products.