Supply-side reform, innovation critical in tackling economic issues: policymaker

The Chinese mainland will tackle its deep-seated economic problems — brought by low-quality growth and unbalanced development — through supply-side structural reform, driving innovation, a revival in rural areas and prioritizing regional development coordination, a senior economic policymaker believes.

“Supply-side structural reforms provide the impetus to improve the quality and efficiency of gross domestic product growth,” Yang Weimin, a deputy director at the Office of the Central Leading Group for Financial and Economic Affairs, said. The central government will develop the real economy, technological innovation, modern finance and human-resource management in a coordinated way to propel quality economic growth.

Yang spoke in Hong Kong at a seminar hosted by the Our Hong Kong Foundation, a think tank founded by Tung Chee-hwa — Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference National Committee vice-chairman and the first chief executive of the special administrative region.

The Office of the Central Leading Group for Financial and Economic Affairs is part of the leading group, a supra-ministerial policy coordination and consultation body dealing with the national economy.

The greatest problem in the mainland’s economic development is that it does not focus on quality, Yang said. “Now, the central government does not mention the doubling of the gross domestic product as its work priority. Rather economic growth should be realized through improvements in quality, efficiency and momentum.”

The economic development strategy blueprint unveiled at the 19th National Congress of the

Yang Weimin,

Communist Party of China in October last year said the country should build up a moderately prosperous society by 2020 and become a strong socialist modernized nation by 2050.

“More focus should be put on how to improve the manufacturing capabilities of the country in order to strengthen the real economy,” Yang envisaged.

“More should be explored on how to integrate the areas of internet, big data and artificial intelligence with real economic activity. The central government also supports the upgrade of traditional manufacturing industries and faster development of modern services industries,” he said.

“Technological innovations will be another engine of economic growth to provide strategic support in developing a modernized economic system on the mainland,” Yang added.