With Great Effort, China Trying To Make Yuan Dominant: Gita Gopinath

China is following a policy to make yuan the dominant currency, but currently it remains far behind the US dollar in international financial transactions unrelated to trade, Indian-American economist Gita Gopinath said.

Ms Gopinath, who would become the first woman chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in January, is currently the John Zwaanstra Professor of International Studies and Economics at Harvard University.

"China is following a market recipe of what it takes to become a dominant currency," Ms Gopinath said in response to a question at a research conference in Washington.

In her research presentation, Ms Gopinath said that China is now one of the largest economies in the world, and the biggest exporter, it appears that Beijing is making tremendous effort to internationalise the renminbi.

Similar to the US interventions in the early 20th century, they have proceeded by encouraging the use of the renminbi in international trade transactions. Following this push, between 2010 and 2015, the renminbi's share as a settlement currency in China's trade has gone from zero per cent in 2010 to 25 per cent in 2015.

Also, renminbi has now surpassed the euro as the second most widely-used currency in global trade finance, Ms Gopinath said.

But renminbi currently remains far behind other major currencies in international financial transactions unrelated to trade, she said.

Ms Gopinath added that in the medium term, the self-reinforcing mechanisms in her model might lead one to predict that the US dollar's dominance would continue largely undisturbed, and that the renminbi would have a hard time gaining much traction in international banking and finance.

"However, in the longer run, if the gap between Chinese and the US shares in the world exports widens far enough, we could eventually get to a point where a renminbi-dominant equilibrium becomes inevitable," she said in her paper, adding that at this point, the US dollar's share in global trade and finance could potentially decline quite sharply," she said.