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Beijing Builds High Ground for World-Class Business Environment - 88 Reform Measures Adopted by World Bank and 395 Launched in Past Two Years

2020-8-12 9:38:49

On 27 July, the World Bank released a special report entitled China’s Doing Business Success: Drivers of Reform and Opportunities for the Future. According to the report, China has made great achievements in advancing reforms to delegate power, streamline administration and optimize government services as well as in improving the business environment. China's leaders have attached great importance to this cause, encouraging local pilot projects and creating successful experiences in establishing reform coordination mechanisms, encouraging the participation of market entities, strengthening the application of information technologies, and promoting two-way exchanges of international and domestic reform experiences.

The report also describes the effective reform measures China has taken in eight areas, such as  “starting a business”, “getting electricity” and “dealing with construction permits”, as outlined in the Doing Business reports, in a bid to share lessons learned from China’s experience in improving the business environment with other economies and then improve the global business environment on the whole.

In recent years, China's participation in the World Bank's Global Doing Business report has been a major step forward in creating a stable, fair, transparent and predictable business environment, which has resulted in a sustained and significant improvement in China's global ranking. As one of the sample cities in the World Bank's assessment of China's business environment, Beijing adheres to the goal of increasing the sense of gain for enterprises and the public, and is oriented towards marketization, the rule of law and international development. Especially in the context of the current outbreak, Beijing takes the optimization of the business environment as a means of coping with the downward pressure on the economy, focusing on the “six stabilization measures” and the “six ensuring measures”. The city has been benchmarking against international rules and highest standards, and remain reform-minded, innovative, focused and pragmatic.

The Beijing Municipal Development and Reform Commission said that over the past three years, Beijing has been learning from the World Bank's business environment evaluation method and has launched a number of innovative and influential reform initiatives to promote the continuous improvement of the business environment and achieved remarkable results.

Implementation Plan for Leading the Reforming and Optimizing the Business Environment was issued in 2017, and Action Plan for Further Optimizing the Business Environment (2018-2020) was issued in 2018, proposing to build the “four demonstration projects” of Beijing Efficiency, Beijing Services, Beijing Standards and Beijing Integrity and the construction of a world-class business environment high ground. Beijing has focused on key areas and introduced reform policies version 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 within two years to optimize the business environment, introducing a total of 395 reform measures to solve key difficulties.

According to the World Bank report, a total of 88 reform initiatives have been adopted by Beijing in the past two years. Among them, six sub-indicators, such as the cost and procedures for obtaining electricity and the construction quality control of the building permit index, have reached or exceeded the world level, and its 24 sub-indicators, such as the procedures and time for registering property and the reliability of obtaining electricity supply, have exceeded the average level of OECD high-income countries, making Beijing a pioneer of reform in the country and even the world.

Nowadays, people can open a business at "zero cost", with "one step" and within "one day" in Beijing. Over the past three years, what has Beijing done to improve the ease with which enterprises can start their businesses? During 2018-2019, Beijing has built an "e-window" platform to solve problems most frequently complained by enterprises and people including complicated procedures, great time cost, and multiple visits to different authorities required. The platform uses big data to break down data silos of various departments and has achieved online "One-Window Handling" for applying for business license, engraving of official seal, receiving invoices, employment information collection and other registration matters. As a result, the procedures needed for enterprise start-ups has been streamlined from 7 to 1, processing time from 24 days compressed to 1 day, thus starting an "one" era for starting businesses, which is the first in the country. The city has also promoted the application of electronic business license and free engraving of official seal, saving the enterprises 60 million yuan every year.

In 2020, Beijing has extended the reform to enterprise change and cancellation, including the citywide promotion of the market subject registration notification and commitment system, making it possible to complete the approval for enterprise establishment within 10 minutes. As of the end of June, 46,000 new enterprises have received their business licenses in this way. UKey for tax affairs has been promoted, a free tool that replaces the old tax-control system, and no fees will be charged in the follow-up links, so that "zero cost" can be achieved for starting businesses.

These are only a microcosm of Beijing’s efforts in vigorously promoting institutional mechanism innovation in key areas and links in the past three years.

The Beijing Municipal Development and Reform Commission indicated that, over the past three years, Beijing has continued to create favourable conditions for the development of enterprises around the pain points and difficult issues in the whole life cycle of enterprises, including optimizing and simplifying the processing of building permits, which now requires only 17 days for the five procedures (one-form processing, application for a construction permit, quality and safety inspection, completion inspection and acceptance, and real estate registration), and reduces the cost to 0.018% of the value of the building. Electricity services have been optimized though measures including the introduction of power supply reliability control working rules, the establishment of power supply interruption rewards and penalties assessment mechanism. At present, the two procedures for electricity (acceptance of contract, construction and grid connection) take only 10 days to finish. The efficiency of real estate registration has been improved, the review time reduced to 2 minutes, and the whole process has been put online. As of June 10, a total of 86 non-residential real estate transactions between enterprises in the city's stock have completed with “zero visit”.

Beijing has also been improving the level of cross-border trade facilitation, optimizing the financing environment, improving its tax services and further promoting the reform of "one door, one website, one window, one visit" for government affairs services.

The Beijing Municipal Development and Reform Commission said that the central government fully recognizes Beijing's achievements, and Beijing has been ranked first in the overall evaluation of China's business environment for two consecutive years.

It has been stressed that optimizing the business environment is a profound self-revolution of the government system. Beijing aims to create favorable conditions for domestic and foreign enterprises to develop in the city, provide stronger support for high-quality economic development, and continue to build a market-oriented, rule-of-law and international business environment.

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