China’s 12th Five Year Plan: A Preliminary Look, Part II

A few days ago, co-blogger Steve Dickinson did a post on China’s 12th Five Year Plan, entitled, “China’s 12th Five Year Plan: A Preliminary Look.” This is a follow-up post, reflecting an outline China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) just put up on its website. Steve has been focusing on the Five Year Plan both because he has and will continue to be speaking on this at various embassies and chambers of commerce (The Swedish Chamber is up next) and because it can be higly relevant for foreign businesses doing business in or with China. Here’s Steve’s post:

The PRC National People’s Congress has published on its website a basic outline of the numeric goals of the 12th Five Year Plan, as follows:

The draft of China’s 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015) was submitted Saturday to the National People’s Congress (NPC), the top legislature for reviewing.

Following are the key targets of the draft:

Economic targets

• GDP to grow by 7 percent annually on average
• More than 45 million jobs to be created in urban areas
• Urban registered unemployment to be kept at less than 5 percent
• Prices to be kept generally stable

Economic restructuring

• Increased domestic consumption
• Breakthrough in emerging strategic industries
• Service sector value-added output to account for 47 percent of GDP, up 4 percentage points
• Urbanization rate to reach 51.5 percent, up 4 percentage points

Innovation

• Expenditures on research and development to account for 2.2 percent of GDP
• 3.3 patents per 10,000 people

Environment & clean energy

• Non-fossil fuel to account for 11.4 percent of primary energy consumption
• Water consumption per unit of value-added industrial output to be cut by 30 percent
• Energy consumption per unit of GDP to be by 16 percent
• Carbon dioxide emission per unit of GDP to be cut by 17 percent
• Forest coverage rate to rise to 21.66 percent and forest stock to increase by 600 million cubic meters

Agriculture

• Annual grain production capacity to be no less than 540 million tones
• Farmland reserves to be no less than 1.818 billion mu

Livelihood

• Population to be no larger than 1.39 billion
• Life span per person to increase by one year
• Pension schemes to cover all rural residents and 357 million urban residents
• Construction and Renovation of 36 million apartments for low-income families
• Minimum wage standard to increase by no less than 13 percent on average each year

Social management

• Improved public service for both urban and rural residents;
• Improved democracy and legal system;
• Better social management system for greater social harmony;
• More than 10 percent of all residents will be registered as community volunteers.

Reform

• Encourage qualified enterprises to list on stock markets
• In-depth reform in monopoly industries for easier market entry and more competition
• Improved government efficiency and credibility

The stated goals roughly follow the CPC Opinion on the Plan discussed in my previous blog post. The following are particularly important/interesting to note:

The GDP growth target is reduced to 7%

The reliance on pseudo-accurate numbers to give the document an air of scientific precision. My favorite is the rise in forest coverage by 21.66 percent.

As always, there is no mention of HOW the plan will be implemented or HOW the plan will be financed.

What do you think?