the economy, avoided a "hard landing," maintained a medium-high growth rate, and promoted structural upgrading. The economic fundamentals that will sustain long-term growth have been cemented and enhanced.
We have continued to follow a proactive fiscal policy and a prudent monetary policy. Despite a fairly big imbalance between government revenue and expenditure, China has led the way in slashing taxes and fees with the aim of using accommodative measures to strengthen the basis for sustained growth. Step by step, we have extended the replacement of business tax with value added tax (VAT) to all sectors across the country, calling time on the 66-year history of business tax. The result so far has been a tax cut of more than 2 trillion yuan. We have also adopted measures like preferential tax policies for small low-profit businesses and an overhaul of different types of fees. All in all, our market entities have seen savings of more than 3 trillion yuan. We have strengthened management over local government debt, and issued local government bonds to replace outstanding debt, cutting interest liability by 1.2 trillion yuan. We have adjusted the structure of government expenditure, put idle funds to work, and ensured the spending for undertaking major projects and meeting basic public needs. The deficit-to-GDP ratio has been kept within 3 percent.
Monetary policy has remained prudent and neutral. The M2 money supply growth rate has been trending downward, while credit and aggregate financing have seen moderate growth. Differentiated policies, such as targeted reserve requirement ratio cuts and targeted re-lending, have been adopted to strengthen support for key fields and weak links. The growth of loans to small and micro businesses has outstripped the average growth in lending. We have reformed and improved the market-based exchange rate mechanism and kept the RMB exchange rate basically stable; and foreign exchange reserves are now rising not falling. We have responded appropriately to abnormal market fluctuations such as the cash crunch, brought better order to the financial markets, prevented and diffused risks in key sectors, forestalled systemic risks, and thus safeguarded China's economic and financial security.
Second, with a commitment to treating supply-side structural reform as our main task, we have focused on fostering new growth drivers to speed up economic structural upgrading.
We have persevered in relying on reform to overcome economic difficulties and address structural imbalances, made a big push to foster emerging industries, overhauled and strengthened traditional industries, and improved the quality and performance of the supply system.
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