By Zhuo Xian, Department of Development Strategy and Regional Economy, DRC & Huang Xia, Beijing Jiaotong University

Research Report, No.98, 2017 (Total 5173) 2017-08-23

Abstract: In order to promote economic institutional reform and improve business environment, the Indian government conducted the reform evaluation on local business environment and reshaped the reform promoting mechanism between the central and local governments through reform competition. The Indian reform competition has realized the quantitative evaluation of reform progress, and is featured by transparent rules, concise methods, measurable targets, comparable results and open ranking, which have given a positive impetus to local governments in implementing the central government’s reform measures. One of the main reasons for the sluggish reform progress in some parts of China is that a mechanism featuring close interactions between the central and local governments has not taken shape. By drawing on the experience of Indian reform competition, this paper suggests that China should restructure the reform evaluation framework, set up quantitative targets to make the evaluation benchmark become more precise, enforce the independent third-party evaluation on reform results, formulate a regular evaluation mechanism, and take the evaluation results as a major indicator for assessing officials’ performance so as to make the process and results of reform evaluation become open and transparent.

Key words: reform competition, promoting mechanism, business environment