Three New Policy Changes In The Territory'S New Planning

Land use intensification, equalization of per capita fiscal expenditure, differentiation of performance appraisal

Recently, the Executive Council of the State Council deliberated and passed the "national main functional area planning" in principle.

At the national level, the plan adopted by the conference has divided the land space into four categories, namely, optimized development, key development, restricted development and prohibition of development, and has defined their respective scopes, development goals, development directions and development principles.

In an interview with the economic reference daily, experts and officials said that pushing forward the formation of the main function area will make the three major historical changes in the regional development: adjusting the territorial spatial structure, intensification of national production and living; achieving equalization of the level of per capita fiscal expenditure among the regions; downplaying and abandoning the G D P performance appraisal system, and heading for differential performance appraisal.

Reorganizing rivers and mountains: territorial planning guides regional planning

A few days ago, in the "global summer forum", Yang Weimin, Deputy Secretary General of the national development and Reform Commission, said: "promoting the formation of the main function area is to adjust the spatial structure, reorganize the rivers and mountains, make the industrial cluster layout, population concentration live, and towns concentrated distribution."

According to the introduction, the formulation of the plan is based on a basic fact: Although the territory is vast, our country has a large population, but there is limited space available for development and utilization, and suitable for people to live, live and produce.

Over the past decades, extensive development of some areas has ignored the blind exploitation of carrying capacity of resources and environment, resulting in pollution of water sources, drying up rivers and lakes and aggravating environmental pollution.

In 2006, the central economic work conference put forward the concept of the main function area planning, namely, "promoting the planning of the main function zones at different levels, so as to provide a scientific basis for promoting the coordinated development of the region".

In September 2007, the plan came into being, and it was approved 3 years later.

An official of the national development and Reform Commission told reporters that "planning" has been carefully launched after a long period of deliberation. Besides involving cumbersome accounting and institutional factors, it also involves development interests in various regions, and involves adjustment of policies of various departments.

In the past, planning was mainly based on the coordination of economy, while the main functional planning of the current round focused on the sustainable and balanced development of the economy, population and environment in the "land space".

It is understood that the main functional areas of the country will be promoted at different levels and divided into two levels, the state and the provincial level.

At the national level, about 30% of the country's land will be divided into 4 categories, namely, the national optimized development area, the key development area, the restricted development area and the prohibited development area.

The rest of the territory is designated by the provincial level as the main functional area.

Experts said that since last year, the State Council has concentrated over a dozen regional plans around China's four major economic regions: East, West, northeast and central.

Although some of these regional plans highlight the development of low carbon economy, there is a lack of a guiding document to guide the development of different regions.

Therefore, the "planning" requires that all regions should not only "head down to development", ignoring the orientation of their own development, and ignoring the interests of the whole country and the whole.

Transfer payment: equalization of per capita fiscal expenditure

Experts told reporters that it is crucial to establish a main functional area and realize the orientation of the main functional areas of the region and to go out of a coordinated development path. The key is to establish a set of mechanisms and systems that all levels of government and all kinds of market players can voluntarily walk along this road. This requires adjustment and reform of some existing policies and systems, the core of which is finance and performance appraisal.

Experts say that the fiscal system needs to be "further reform".

The direction of reform should be that the scale of fiscal expenditure depends mainly on the size of the population, rather than on the scale of fiscal revenue, so that the behavior of local development can not be distorted.

According to the expectation of the parties concerned, after the implementation of the plan, China will gradually establish a pfer payment system with balanced fiscal pfer payment as the main body, improve the balanced pfer payment coefficient of central and provincial finance to the ecological areas and agricultural areas, increase the ecological protection expenditure projects in the ecological area, co-ordinate the current special pfer payment of various ecological environment and turn it into a comprehensive ecological rehabilitation pfer payment, and increase the input of all levels of finance to the prohibited development area.

"We should adjust and improve the current equilibrium (general) pfer payment formula on the basis of scientifically determining the factors and determining the weights, and the ultimate goal should be the equalization of the per capita fiscal expenditure level among regions."

Xu Lin, director of the finance and Finance Division of the national development and Reform Commission, said.

Experts suggest that in order to ensure the scientificalness and rationality of the general pfer payment formula, we can consider setting up a general committee of pfer payment expert committee, which is responsible for the determination and adjustment of the pfer payment formula, and proposes the pfer payment plan.

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Desalination of GDP: towards differential performance appraisal

"Performance evaluation is the evaluation orientation of scientific development of land space. We should implement the performance evaluation and performance appraisal with different emphasis on the basis of the main functions of different regions, instead of assessing the same content in all regions."

Yang Weimin, Deputy Secretary General of the national development and Reform Commission, told the economic reference daily.

An expected policy trend is that domestic performance appraisal will undergo major changes.

The evaluation of the economic institutions, resource consumption, environmental protection, independent innovation and the coverage of public service of the foreign population should be strengthened to weaken the evaluation of the growth of G D P, investment, import and export trade.

To restrict the development of agricultural areas, we should strengthen the evaluation of the support ability of agricultural products, weaken the evaluation of relevant economic indicators of industrialization and urbanization, mainly evaluate the comprehensive agricultural production capacity, and the protection of cultivated land, especially the basic farmland.

To restrict the development of ecological areas, we should strengthen the evaluation of the ability to provide ecological products. We should not evaluate G D P, investment, industry, agricultural production, fiscal revenue, industrialization and urbanization.

For a long time, there are some phenomena such as disorderly development, unfair competition and blind G D P in some parts of China. One of the important reasons is that the current local government performance appraisal or evaluation mechanism is unreasonable, unscientific and non-standard, which induces short-term behavior of many local leaders, and is keen on Performance projects and face engineering.

Du Pin, executive director of the Regional Economic Association of China, said that for the evaluation of regional development, we must resolutely abandon the G D P oriented index system.

Therefore, when specifying the relevant assessment or assessment indicators and standards, we must stress the importance of highlighting the benefits of local residents, whether the basic livelihood issues have been improved, the situation of resource saving and environmental friendly society, and the degree of social stability.