Index to help coordinate key economic belt's development

How to assess the level of the coordinated development of a region has long been a headache-maker for central policymakers who largely rely on the reports submitted by local governments to make and adjust their policies.

The defects of this policymaking model are evident as local authorities tend to overstate the industrial strengths of their respective jurisdictions, or problems in some cases, in a bid to grab more financial and policy support from the higher authorities.

In practice, the squeaky-wheel-get-soiled approach sometimes works contrary to its intended objective of bridging regional development gaps.

As such, an index system that can be applied to evaluate the coordinated balanced development level of a region that a think tank released in Beijing on Friday is undoubtedly a breakthrough.

The index has been created by researchers at the Jiangsu Yangtze River Economic Belt Research Institute, who based their studies on the Yangtze River Economic Belt's development over the past seven years. They have proposed a three-level index system, with balance, coordination and integration the top-level indexes.

Under the balance index are three subindexes on people's livelihoods, public services and public facilities. Under the coordination index are four subindexes on industry, urban development, society and nature; And under the integration index are five subindexes on ecology, transportation, economy, market and institutions. And under all the subindexes in the three fields there are 10 third-level indexes.

According to Cheng Changchun, director of the think tank, the design of the index system is based on the State Council's directives and the relevant instructions of the central authorities on the coordinated balanced development of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, a regional development strategy the central government launched in 2016.

The Yangtze River Economic Belt covers an area of 2.05 million square kilometers, six times the size of Germany, and is home to a population of 608 million, 43 percent of the national total, contributing about 46 percent of China's GDP. It consists of 11 provincial-level regions including developed megacities such as Shanghai and the less-developed inland Guizhou province. Its per capita disposable income varies from $12,130 in Shanghai to $3,924 in Guizhou.

Applying that index system, the researchers found the economic belt has made marked progress in promoting regional industrial relocation, green development, coordinated innovation and docking some institutions. They also found some knotty problems remain. For instance, the rise of some provincial capital cities, such as Wuhan, Changsha and Chengdu, has actually hollowed out their surrounding areas aggravating the development gap within the provinces.

Moreover, local protectionism now exists in more invisible forms particularly at the county and city level in less-developed regions, as local governors' priority remains the development of their own jurisdictions. So they tend to implement some beggar-thy-neighbor policies, which obstruct the interregional flow of production factors and divide the market. This problem is particularly prominent in the border regions between provinces.

Environmental pollution and ecological degradation are other growing concerns. Although the better-off coastal provinces, such as Jiangsu and Zhejiang, have largely bid farewell to polluting industries, the relocating of these industries to the middle and upper reaches of the river turns the environmental threat from a problem of the river mouth region to the whole basin of the 6,300-km Yangtze. Worse, the upper reaches of the world's third-longest river have a delicate ecology that once damaged will be difficult to restore.

As Fan Hengshan, an economist with Wuhan University, noted at the launch of the report, although the better-off regions provide subsidies to their less-developed counterparts to discourage them to rely on polluting industries to boost growth, which works for cities in neighboring Zhejiang and Anhui, it's hard to be rolled out over such a large area as the Yangtze basin, which entails a complicated balance of interests.

Fan, who is also a former key member of the regional development policymaking circle of the central government, urged researchers to further improve their index system to enable it to reflect the dynamic situation more objectively and clearly.

Also as Fan noted, the index system should be problem/solution-oriented and people-focused. It needs to be a reliable framework to help identify the concrete problems of different provinces, as it is provincial authorities that play a crucial role in regional development, rather than the city governments the report looks to at the moment. That way it will be better able to prompt policymakers to concentrate on resolving the core issue — filling the development gaps and realizing social fairness and justice.