(Xiaochen 4x/Picture)
More than 20,000 pieces of official website data, 3,600 market entity questionnaires, 42 county and city unannounced surveys, 84 service unit visits, and nearly three months of on-site consultations. After using five evaluation methods to evaluate the business environment of 21 prefecture-level cities in Guangdong Province, on the afternoon of December 30, 2022, the "2022 Guangdong Province Business Environment Assessment Report" was released. At the
press conference, Zhu Wei, deputy director of the Guangdong Provincial Development and Reform Commission and executive deputy director of the Guangdong Provincial Greater Bay Area Office, said that this evaluation mainly draws on the two indicator systems of the World Bank Business Environment Assessment and the China Business Environment Assessment, and has set up 19 first-level indicators and 77 second-level indicators. The evaluation results show that among the 21 prefecture-level cities, Shenzhen and Guangzhou are tied for the first echelon.
On November 19, 2021, the State Council Information Office announced the first six pilot cities for business environment innovation in the country, including Guangzhou and Shenzhen.
Regarding how the business environment has changed since Guangzhou became a pilot city, in response to a question from a Southern Weekend reporter, Deng Maoying, deputy secretary-general of the Guangzhou Municipal Government, said that the current pilot tasks have been basically completed. The number of various market entities in Guangzhou exceeded 3.12 million in the first three quarters, and the number of new registrations ranked first in the province. Business processing time, procedures, payment costs, etc. have been reduced, and social enterprise service quality, cross-border trade convenience, and public legal services have become more convenient.
"Authentic reflection of the true feelings of enterprises"
Guangdong Province has always been at the forefront in the theoretical and practical exploration of business environment across the country.
As early as June 2012, Guangdong Province organized a survey on topics related to "Building a Legalized International Business Environment." At the end of 2014, the "Foshan City Business Environment Indicator System" was released, Foshan became a domestic pioneer in exploring the practice of an international legalized business environment.
In 2018, optimizing the business environment became the first topic of the first executive meeting of the State Council. Beginning in the same year, in accordance with the principles of "international comparability, benchmarking national assessments, and Guangdong characteristics", Guangdong Province established a business environment assessment indicator system and methods, and successively carried out business environment assessments in the province. The assessment scope expanded from 11 prefecture-level cities in 2019 to 21 in 2020.
Zhu Wei said that compared with previous years, the business environment assessment work in 2022 has been further optimized in terms of methods, changing the evaluation method of simply summarizing data and "test-and-response type", focusing on using five methods of online public information analysis, on-site unannounced visits, questionnaire surveys, department data analysis, and on-site consultations to carry out evaluations. Among them, on-site unannounced visits are the highlight.
He revealed that the county-level cities for unannounced field visits were randomly selected from prefecture-level cities by the evaluation team, and each prefecture-level city had two quotas. Before the unannounced visit, the evaluation team went straight to the business service hall without giving any notice or greeting, to check the on-site environment, service guides, procedures and charging standards, and to randomly interview the real feelings and opinions of the service people.
"Insisting on using data to speak and authentically reflecting the true feelings of enterprises is the consistent principle of Guangdong Province in carrying out business environment assessment work of market entities." Guan Xiangming, member and secretary-general of the Provincial Federation of Industry and Commerce Party Group, said that compared with 2021, the business environment assessment content in 2022 is more complete, the participants are wider, and the screening requirements are stricter. The recognition of market entities has been significantly improved, and the overall score has increased by 4.35 points compared with 2021.
From a national perspective, Guangdong Province’s business environment construction has also achieved remarkable results. On November 4, 2022, the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce released the "2022 "Business Environment Evaluation by Tens of Thousands of Private Enterprises" Report", which shows that Guangdong Province has been rated as the "Province with the Best Reputation for Business Environment" for three consecutive years. At the same time, Shenzhen and Guangzhou ranked first and third among the cities with the best reputation for business environment.
Zhu Wei emphasized that business environment evaluation “does not judge heroes by ranking”, but the purpose is to “promote construction through evaluation” and create a better development environment. When answering reporters' questions, he mentioned that through practice, Guangdong Province has summarized the three major evaluation concepts of "focusing on the effect of policy implementation, focusing on the feelings of market entities, and focusing on objective data comparison", focusing on whether market entities can pass the policy and truly enjoy the dividends.
Guangzhou’s six pilot breakthroughs
ranks in the first echelon of Guangdong Province’s business environment assessment and is also among the first batch of business environment innovation pilot cities in the country. In January 2022, Guangzhou issued the "Guangzhou City Implementation Plan for Building a National Business Environment Innovation Pilot City" in the name of the municipal government, launching the Business Environment 5.0 reform.
When answering questions from Southern Weekend reporters, Deng Maoying, deputy secretary-general of the Guangzhou Municipal Government, said that under the framework of a leading group headed by the main leaders of the Guangzhou Municipal Party Committee and the Municipal Government, Guangzhou has established an innovation pilot task force, and the city leaders will promote the details and implementation of various reforms through on-site meetings and scheduling meetings. At present, various pilot tasks deployed by the country have been basically completed, and six major breakthroughs have been achieved in improving the business environment.
Deng Maoying said that with the improvement of the business environment, the time for business-related business processing has been shortened significantly. The entire process of starting a business can be completed in half a day at the fastest. It only takes 100 seconds for taxpayers to apply for invoices. The authorization witness system for Hong Kong and Macao cases only takes five minutes from logging in to signing the power of attorney. After the simple low-risk project approval reform, the construction project planning license and the construction project construction license can be approved as soon as the same day.
In addition, Guangzhou has also taken the lead in the province to launch "autonomous invoice collection" and "automatic review" and "automatic issuance" of invoice applications. A "special enterprise window" has been set up for real estate registration to realize "one window, one person, one set of information and one link" for inter-enterprise non-residential transfer registration and other services to reduce processes and procedures.
In addition to services, Guangzhou City also provides enterprises with "real money" discounts and support. Since 2022, Guangzhou has handled a total of more than 55 billion yuan in tax refunds for enterprises, which is five times the scale in 2021. The cost of business expenses is lower, engineering construction projects can be handled for free throughout the process, and business seals can be carved for free when starting a business.
In order to improve the quality of social enterprise services, Guangzhou has also implemented "one-stop" processing, including 111 items into "integrated services", and "enjoyed without application" for 65 items, cashing in funds exceeding 4.2 billion yuan, benefiting nearly 60,000 companies.
In terms of cross-border trade, the current overall customs clearance time of Guangzhou Customs for import and export has been reduced by 75% and 95% respectively compared with 2017, ranking among the top in the country. There are also innovations in the export model, taking the lead in creating a new cross-border e-commerce export model of "air-rail combined transport" and opening a new path of " sea-rail combined transport ".
Finally, in terms of public legal services, the world's first Internet arbitration "Guangzhou Standard" was successfully released. More than 3,000 public law service platforms in Guangzhou have achieved full coverage of cities, districts, and streets. A "full-service, full-time and space" legal service network and a "30 seconds online, half an hour offline" service ecosystem have been basically formed.
Deng Maoying mentioned that in the future, Guangzhou will continue to play the leading role of innovative pilot reforms, seize the major opportunities of the "Nansha Plan", strive to form more institutional innovation results that can be replicated and promoted, and provide more "Guangzhou experience" for the reform of the business environment in the whole province.
Southern Weekend reporter Jiang Minyu
