Whether the Chinese renminbi should be permitted to join the Special Drawing Right is one of those questions that appears economically substantive at a distance but rather more politically tokenistic from close up.

For some enthusiasts, the recommendation by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) staff that the renminbi become the fifth member of the basket quasi-currency — along with the dollar, euro, yen and sterling — will boost the Chinese unit’s claim to the status of a global reserve asset.

The truth is less dramatic. The IMF staff’s view — very likely to be ratified by its governing board — that the renminbi is “freely usable” and hence can join the SDR is presentationally important. The renminbi will have a new imprimatur of respectability from an institution with which it has often had a tetchy relationship. But it is not a substitute for Beijing continuing to liberalise financial markets and capital flows in order to promote the use of its currency abroad.

For the most part, the SDR remains little more than an accounting device and an obscure class of official reserve assets created under the aegis of the IMF. It is neither a true currency nor a claim on the fund itself. The IMF’s members made much of their creation of nearly $300bn in new SDR assets in 2009 to boost official liquidity as part of the official response to the global financial crisis. Yet the unit has remained little used, and official SDR-denominated assets still have to be changed back into their constituent currencies to be workable. Accordingly they are little use for intervention purposes by central banks.

Being in the SDR basket is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for a currency to be widely held in official reserves. Before the SDR was reformed in 1981, 16 currencies were members, including such unlikely global reserve assets as the Iranian rial, to no apparent end. By contrast, the Swiss franc is still quite widely held as an official store of value despite not being a member of the present-day SDR.

If China wishes the renminbi to be widely used as a reserve asset, it needs to be prepared to create large amounts of the currency — as has the US with the dollar — and send it abroad. Beijing’s tight control of capital flows and its apparent fear of a large balance of payments deficit militate against that.

The decision’s political significance outweighs its economic import. By ruling that the renminbi is freely usable, the IMF has undoubtedly sided with those elements inside the Chinese system — notably the People’s Bank of China — who have consistently and rightly been arguing for Beijing to liberalise capital flows and the currency. Whether or not the decision will keep up the pressure for further deregulation or allow the Chinese government to rest on its laurels remains to be seen, but at least the signalling suggests that Beijing is moving in the right direction.

Signalling, however, is about as far as this decision goes. Ultimately, the global use of a currency is based not on bureaucratic decisions taken at a supranational level but on national authorities establishing a record in competent monetary and financial policy and on the ready availability of the unit in question.

At the margin, the inclusion of the renminbi in the SDR will be a boost for the forces of liberalisation within the Chinese system, and of the further integration of China within the structures of global economic governance. But anyone expecting the decision to act as an inflection point either for the international use of the renminbi or the credibility of the SDR itself is likely to be disappointed.