WASHINGTON - A group of leading experts from the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) are scheduled to visit China later this month to attend a high-level symposium and conduct discussions on various economic and trade topics with Chinese policymakers and economists, the institute announced on Wednesday.

The US group will be headed by PIIE President Adam Posen and consists of renowned economists including Nicholas Lardy, Jacob Kirkegaard, David Stockton, Nicholas Borst and Jeffrey Schott, said Borst, China program manager of the think tank.

They would visit Shanghai and attend a two-day China-US Economists Symposium cosponsored by the PIIE and China Finance 40 Forum (CF40) which was set to kick off on April 12 in Beijing, covering topics including China's economic transformations, US fiscal sustainability, exchange rates and regional trade agreements, Borst told a group of reporters at a briefing.

Founded in 1981, the PIIE is a private, nonprofit and nonpartisan research institution devoted to the study of international economic policy. This is the second time for the think tank to send a big group of economists to attend such symposium after the visit of a group of experts to China last year.