On Jan. 19, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) showed a list of reforms in 2016, including salt reform, forestry reform, electricity reform, reform of official vehicle system, pricing reform and mixed ownership reform, etc.
Meanwhile, reforms to be carried out in 2017 are on the way. It is learnt that pilot reform of mixed ownership of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) led by Department of Economic System Reform of NDRC will be expanded at the country level. In addition, electricity reform will further target the plan of orderly liberating generation and utilization of electricity.
26 reform tasks led by NDRC accomplished
It is introduced that based on the work focus of the Leading Group for Overall Reform for 2016, there are 26 reform tasks led by the NDRC in 2016 and it has fully finished formulating schemes on these reforms.
There are several key tasks. “The NDRC regarded reform as a priority among priorities, endeavored to push forward various reform tasks, made new breakthrough in some significant fields and key links and strengthened vitality of main market players and endogenous power of economic development in 2016.” said Xu Shanchang, head of Department of Economic System Reform of NDRC.
The NDRC worked out and implemented the State Council’s opinion on key work of deepening economic system reform in 2016 through inter-ministerial meeting mechanism of work on economic system reform. It basically accomplished 50 major reform tasks in 10 aspects and 237 detailed reform measures and launched or reported reform schemes which were required to introduce within 2016.
Reforms in various industries gained fruitful results
Reforms in various industries gained fruitful results last year. New results were achieved in price reforms of resource products such as electricity, refined oil product, natural gas and water, and important progress were made in price reform of medical service and railway service for passenger traffic. Specifically, substantial step was made in reform in some key industries including salt industry, forestry and electricity industry.
The journalist found that by now, 4 schemes of the first batch of pilot reform of SOEs mixed ownership have been approved and implemented; electricity system reform pilot has covered 30 provinces and cities and Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), and nearby consumption of renewable energy resources have been conducted in 3 provinces; implementation schemes of salt industrial system reform in 31 provinces and cities have been approved; pilot reform of state-owned forestry farms in Zhejiang and other 5 provinces has been finished successfully; and test on national overall reform has been advanced deeply.
Reform benefits people and the whole society. Taking electricity reform for example, more than 1 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity were traded in the whole country in 2016, accounting for about 19 percent of the total electricity consumption. Electricity price declined by about 0.0723 yuan per kilowatt hour at average, saving more than 57.3 billion yuan for users.
Next, the electricity reform will speed up the plan of liberating generation and utilization of electricity to give more play to market mechanism in resource allocation.
“According to target of the reform, plans except regulatory plan on power generation should be liberated by 2020, so there should be bigger moves this year.” Wang Qiang, inspector from the Department of Economic System Reform, remarked that recently the NDRC was formulating a circular on orderly liberating generation and utilization of electricity and would unveil it at proper time. In principle, there will be no plans on newly added coal-fired power units and large electricity users.
Mixed ownership reform to see upgrading in 2017
Reforms to be carried out in 2017 are on the way. Pilot reform of mixed ownership of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) led by the Department of Economic System Reform will be expanded at the country level. Besides, local governments will also accelerate to propel mixed ownership reform. Most provinces released signals at recent two sessions that they would roll out pilot of mixed ownership reform. This undoubtedly leads to more expectation on upgrading of mixed ownership reform.
“We should grasp 4 principles when pushing forward mixed ownership reform pilot. Firstly, we should improve governance and corporate governance structure should be further perfected. Only by this can we ensure SOEs to be the major market players in true sense. Secondly, we should enhance incentives and give full consideration to some incentive measures on issues including wages of managers and employee shareholding plan. Thirdly, principal industries should be highlighted. The last one is to improve efficiency.” said Xu.
The journalist noticed that Zhejiang province is included by the NDRC in the first batch of pilot of mixed ownership reform and equity diversification ratio of Zhejiang provincial enterprises at all levels is over 70 percent. State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) of Zhejiang province takes actively and steadily implementing asset securitization of provincial enterprises as the major thrust of developing mixed ownership economy and proposes that these enterprises’ asset securitization ratio should reach around 75 percent during the 13th Five-year Plan period.
Besides NDRC and local governments, SASAC, central SOEs and local SOEs are all actively promoting pilot of mixed ownership reform.
China National Petroleum Corporation, China North Industries Group Corporation and other central SOEs have specified the thoughts of advancing the development of mixed ownership economy. When deploying key work for 2017, China Electronics Corporation also expressed that it will pay special attention to capital operation and make efforts in asset securitization and mixed ownership reform.
Translated By Vanessa Chen
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