Full Text: Report on the Work of the Government(11)

The main targets for this year's economic and social development are as follows: to increase GDP by 7.5%, create more than 9 million new jobs in towns and cities, keep the registered urban unemployment rate at or below 4.6%, hold increases in the CPI to around 4%, increase the volume of total exports and imports by around 10%, and continue to improve our balance of payments. At the same time, we will make further progress in industrial restructuring, innovation, energy conservation, and emissions reduction, and ensure that both urban and rural residents' real incomes increase in line with economic growth. Here I wish to stress that in setting a slightly lower GDP growth rate, we hope to make it fit with targets in the Twelfth Five-Year Plan, and to guide people in all sectors to focus their work on accelerating the transformation of the pattern of economic development and making economic development more sustainable and efficient, so as to achieve higher-level, higher-quality development over a longer period of time. In projecting a CPI increase of around 4%, we have taken into account imported inflation, rising costs of factors of production, and people's ability to absorb the impact of price increases, while leaving room for the effect of price reforms.

Taking into consideration all relevant factors, we will continue to follow a proactive fiscal policy and a prudent monetary policy, carry out timely and appropriate anticipatory adjustments and fine-tuning, and make our policies more targeted, flexible, and anticipatory.

We will continue to implement a proactive fiscal policy. We will keep the deficit and government debt at appropriate levels. This year, we are projecting a deficit of 800 billion yuan, a decrease to around 1.5% of GDP, which consists of a 550 billion yuan central government deficit and 250 billion yuan of bonds issued on behalf of local governments. We will improve the structure of expenditures and give priority to spending in key areas. We will increase spending on areas which are important to the people's wellbeing, such as education, culture, medical and health care, employment, social security, and low-income housing projects. We will pay greater attention to strengthening weak links, and increase funding for agriculture, rural areas, farmers, underdeveloped areas, scientific and technological innovation, energy conservation, environmental protection, water conservancy, and geological prospecting. We will be more economical; strictly restrict spending on official overseas trips, vehicles for official use, and official hospitality; greatly reduce meetings and documents; deepen reform of the system for the use of official cars; and further reduce administrative costs. We will continue to restrict the construction of office buildings in terms of both size and grades, and reduce spending on building large gymnasiums and stadiums. We will also comprehensively strengthen auditing of key areas, sectors, and funds. We will introduce structural tax reductions. We will fully implement and improve all preferential tax policies to support the development of small, micro and individually owned businesses, and carry out pilot projects to replace business tax with VAT. We will continue to investigate the collection and use of administrative fees and operations of government-managed funds, merge them where necessary, and ensure fees are collected and government-managed funds are operated in a standardized way. We will strengthen supervision of local government debt and guard against risks. We will continue to deal with outstanding debts properly by classifying them into different categories and managing them accordingly, dealing with different situations differently, and resolving problems gradually. We will further investigate and standardize financing companies run by local governments. Governments at all levels are prohibited from making guarantees and promises in this respect in violation of laws and regulations. At the same time, we will both take short-term measures and build permanent systems, strictly limit new local government debt, and place revenue and expenditures of local government debt under budgetary management on the basis of their type.