Chongqing's business environment indicators exceed world average: World Bank

Among the five indicators for starting a business in Chongqing, applying for construction permits, registering properties, executing contracts, and handling bankruptcy have all exceeded the world average, according to results released by the World Bank's consultation and evaluation. In particular, the indicators for property registration, contract execution, and bankruptcy handling have reached the level of developed economies.

Chongqing fully benchmarks the business environment evaluation standards by the World Bank, through introducing optimization policies and solving enterprises' pain points in their production and operation processes.

Specifically, Chongqing has strengthened organizational leadership, improved its promotion mechanism, built a scientific policy system, enhanced its policy interpretation and carried out a series of promotion activities to optimize its business environment.

It is worth noting that to further standardize and reduce enterprise-related costs, government purchases of services are often used to eliminate hidden costs, and the entire process of starting a business is handled free of charge. Other practices include simplifying the approval process of submitted materials, where the transfer registration of stock housing was reduced to one step only, and the certificate can be obtained on the spot right away.

Meanwhile, the convenience of Chongqing's approval process on application materials ranks among the top in the country. Specifically, the approval, application materials, and processing time for construction projects have been streamlined by more than 50 percent, and the entire process of small and low-risk construction projects has been reduced to eight days, with a reduced time of 34 days.

According to the comparison between the 2019 evaluation report of the Development Research Center of the State Council and the 2020 evaluation report of the World Bank, from the three indicators involved in the two assessments when starting a business, processing construction permits, and registering property, 60 percent of work time and 52 percent of the work process were reduced in Chongqing.

Meanwhile, Chongqing actively launched the "Shanghai-Chongqing Express Line" to solve the congestion problem of the Yangtze River Golden Waterway. The overall water transport time on ports between Chongqing and Shanghai was reduced by an average of 40 percent, which met the expectation of foreign trade enterprises in production and logistics aspects.

In addition, through building smart government affairs, improving the efficiency of services, and accelerating the creation of a new model of "Yukuaiban", or government services accessed through an app, data can be used and applied much more smoothly and effectively.

Statistics show that the number of registered users on the "Yukuaiban" platform reached 20.66 million, and the number of applications exceeded 140 million. Specifically, the proportion of "one time" municipal administrative licensing matters exceeded 99 percent, and more than 95 percent of matters can be processed and completed online.

In the future, Chongqing will learn from other advanced regional experiences and practices domestically, with a target of promoting the optimization of policies and enhancing the effect of policy implementation.