Sound business environment is like sunshine, water and air for enterprises. In recent years, many
places in China have achieved obvious progress in improving their business environment, aiming
to offer world-class climate for enterprises.
Beijing has enhanced its support for enterprises and improved its all-procedure approval
efficiency. Shanghai tailored regulations that suit its own conditions and have built a service
system that covers the whole life cycle of enterprises. Guangzhou in south China’s Guangdong
province takes how market entities feel as a primary evaluation index of business environment,
and has established a multi-dimensional supervising mechanism that is oriented toward the
satisfaction of enterprises.
In recent years, China has been taking huge efforts to optimize business environment. It has
continuously improved relevant systems and mechanism, significantly expanded market access,
advanced fair regulation and perfected government services.
According to the World Bank’s Doing Business 2020 report, China’s business environment has
raised to the 31st place in the global ranking, up by 47 places from two years ago, making the
major economy that saw the most considerable improvement in business environment.
Since 2012, over 10 million market entities have been newly established in China on an annual
basis, and around 70 percent of these entities are active. It used to take them averagely 22.9 days
to set up a company, and now the figure has been cut to less than four workdays. The constantly
improving business environment is playing a very important role in such progress.
Better government services make stronger development impetus. Recently, the State Council
issued a guideline making clear that pilot reform steps to improve business environment will be
rolled out in six cities, including Beijing; Shanghai; Chongqing; Hangzhou, capital of East China’s
Zhejiang province; Guangzhou and Shenzhen in Guangdong province.
This move aimed to further improve the energy and development quality of market entities, and
will set an example for business environment building in other regions of the country. It is of
important significance for better collaboration between the market and the government, stabilizing
market expectation and maintaining economic stability.
Whether a country has a sound business environment shall be judged by its market entities. In
general, most of the market entities in China have benefited from and are satisfied with the efforts
of local authorities to improve business environment.
To further improve business climate and stimulate the vitality of entities, the guideline issued by
the State Council has set major goals in a number of aspects. It includes a list of 101 reform
measures, as well as a list of relevant administrative regulations that are to be adjusted in the six
pilot cities.
The quality, efficiency and dynamics of the Chinese economy are all going through a reform,
while institutional supply has become an important core competitiveness. To pilot reform steps in
the six cities will gain more replicable experiences and bring Chinese business environment onto
higher levels.
Improvement of the business environment is an on-going process, and there is always room for
things to become better. It is believed that by its continuous efforts to improve business
environment and stimulate market vitality, China will surely achieve higher-quality development
of its economy.
