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ABSTRACT:
ISSUE NOTE 2000-1
by Edward Leman, President, Chreod Ltd.
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The Tenth Five Year Plan, to be promulgated by the National People's Congress in March, 2001, is expected to translate the government's "Great Western Development Strategy" into a program of initial actions to guide economic develop-ment in China's ten Western Provinces and Autonomous Regions1. The central government, through the "Leading Group for the Great Western Development", has been working since February 2000 to draft the Strategy and to prepare proposals for the Tenth Five Year Plan (TFYP).
This paper examines some key issues in regional development planning methodology that should be considered in the preparation of the Western Strategy. Rather than making specific suggestions on the content of the Strategy, we believe that it is important and timely that the Leading Group and participating ministries finetune their approach to the planning process to avoid the many costly mistakes that have been made in regional development efforts in Canada and other countries. Specifically, the Note calls for: the careful identification of Regional Systems of settlement in the West, based on international best practice in regional analysis; a reassessment of disparities based on functional Regional Systems rather than provinces; focusing development efforts on core Regional Systems, including improving functional and physical linkages to less-developed areas in the periphery of these Systems, and connections between Systems; design of a process for achieving consensus on a wide range of development objectives among various levels of government; regulatory impact analysis of existing laws and regulations to maximize their usefulness to the Western Strategy; and the pragmatic selection and application of existing and new policy instruments that are likely to have the greatest leverage in today’s emerging market economy.
While the Issue Note reflects only Chreod's views, it builds principally on two recent consulting assignments and one current study by the firm for the Government of China2. 1) a review of public infrastructure investment policy for the Ministry of Finance and ADB; 2) a study on municipal finance reforms for the Ministry of Finance and ADB; and 3) a two-year assessment of urban and regional development trends in ten provinces comprising the Yangtze River Basin (four of which are in the Western Region).
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SITE UPDATED: 19 May 2006
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