Private investment

Private capital's participation in infrastructure construction can help improve efficiency and benefit the public, said an article in China Youth Daily. An excerpt follows:

The Jiangmen-Zhuhai Expressway was put into use on Wednesday. It is the first expressway solely invested and constructed by a non-State-run enterprise in South China's Guangdong Province. The expressway has cut the travel distance between the cities in half and highway fees have also been halved. According to the expressway company, the total construction cost of the project is 3.067 billion yuan ($398 million) and the cost per kilometer is only 57.54 million yuan ($7.47 million), about 20 percent lower than the cost of other expressways in the province.

The topic of expressway construction has been much discussed in recent years. The development mode of "building the roads with loans and collecting fees to pay the debt" has become a way for some regional governments to make fat profits. There are many corruption cases in the construction of expressways. And because of the good remuneration, even some graduate students are applying to become toll collectors. A report by the World Bank pointed out that the fees on China's expressways are quite high compared with many developed countries. They are among the world's highest if compared with the income levels of Chinese motorists.