Full Text: Report on China's economic, social development plan(11)

-- Continuing to improve the people's lives. We will increase urban jobs by more than nine million and keep the rates for urban registered unemployment and natural population growth under 4.6% and 6.5 per thousand, respectively; raise urban and rural real incomes in step with economic growth; extend the new type of old-age insurance for rural residents and the old-age insurance for non-working urban residents to cover all counties or county-level cities and districts; and basically complete work on a total of five million units of low-income housing projects and start work on an additional seven million plus units in urban areas. Our main consideration in setting these targets is that in 2012, our country's economic growth might slow down, and we will face numerous difficulties and challenges in the efforts to further expand employment, increase personal incomes, and improve the social security system. Bearing this in mind, we need to correctly handle the relationship between developing the economy and improving the people's lives by attaching even greater importance to ensuring and improving the people's wellbeing; increase investment and improve the institutional framework; work harder to properly solve practical problems that concern the immediate interests of the people; and successfully accomplish all the above targets.

-- Further improving the balance of payments. China's import and export volume is expected to increase about 10%. We will further reduce trade surplus and quickly develop trade in services; and we will continue to optimize the structure of foreign investment utilization and steadily expand Chinese investment overseas. In setting these targets, we have taken into account the following factors. The environment for global economic development as a whole is not likely to improve noticeably this year, and our exports will face grim situations of growing trade and investment protectionism and sluggish external demand. Even so, we have overall advantages when we participate in economic globalization in all directions, at multiple levels and in all areas, as the quality of our workforce continues to improve, technological innovation speeds up, and our enterprises become more capable of expanding international markets. So, as long as we successfully implement a more active opening up strategy, accelerate change in the way we develop our foreign trade, quickly seize every new opportunity created by changes in international markets, and strive to strengthen traditional markets while opening up new ones, we can surely stabilize and expand the international market share that we have worked so hard for and maintain steady development of foreign trade.