To advance China’s goal of developing its market-oriented economy, a comprehensive two-year pilot programme has been launched in 10 economically significant regions – aiming to improve the market-based allocation of key resources such as technology, land and data.
The undertaking seeks to remove institutional barriers, improve resource-allocation efficiency, and promote high-quality development by allowing markets to play a decisive role in pricing and distributing factors of production, as growth of the world’s second-largest economy remains under pressure, according to a directive published on Thursday.
The 10 regions designated for related experiments include Beijing’s Tongzhou district; the Greater Bay Area; parts of Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces; Chengdu in Sichuan province; and Chongqing municipality, all of which “possess favourable conditions for carrying out reforms and are highly representative”.
These targeted and tailored pilot programmes reflect China’s stepped-up efforts to deepen reform of the factor market – in which factors of production are bought and sold – which is key to building a unified national market and establishing a high-level socialist market economy, said Li Chunlin, deputy head of the National Development and Reform Commission, the country’s top economic planner.
“Since the reform and opening-up [period, which began decades ago], most goods and services in China have shifted to market-based pricing and free flow, but the factor-market system remains underdeveloped, hindering the market’s decisive role in resource allocation,” he said at a press conference on the same day.
Xi issues rallying call against protectionism in Brics speech
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The pilot programme not only addresses traditional factors such as land, labour and capital, it also encourages participating regions to pioneer innovative approaches to allocating and monetising resources such as data, computing power, airspace and the orbital spectrum – thereby accelerating the growth of “new quality productive forces”, an economic concept coined by President Xi Jinping last year.