The Opinions on Accelerating the Establishment of Unified Domestic Market, approved at the 23rd meeting of the Central Committee for Deepening Overall Reform on December 17, 2021, was officially released recently. According to the Opinions, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region is encouraged to carry out regional market integration first under the premise of maintaining a unified domestic market, in combination with the implementation of major regional strategies and coordinated regional development strategies.
Being unified, open, competitive and orderly, the unified domestic market will have a basic pattern with unified rules, full competition, high openness and orderly operation. To solve the issue of market segmentation is the most critical goal of establishing a unified domestic market.
The integration of market is still the goal of establishing a unified domestic market whilst advancing coordinated development of regions. The integration of market involves many aspects, such as commodities, factors and various industries. Diverse factors will affect establishment of the unified domestic market, including regional geographical position, economic development, technological development, domestic opening degree, transportation infrastructure and local protectionism.
To establish a unified domestic market whilst advancing coordinated development of regions, we need to well connect the economy of regions which is part of regional integration, give full play to the leading role of market in coordinated regional development, break administrative boundaries, improve space governance system and push ahead with platform building, spatial planning system construction and incentive mechanism design. First, we will build a national platform for joint space governance. Big data makes the establishment of a unified domestic market possible. We will solve market segmentation from the perspective of open information/price through building national factor trading platforms (land market, labor market, capital market, technology market and data market) and national commodity trading platforms (commodity transaction platform and consumer goods trading platform). Second, we will build a spatial planning system to achieve joint space governance. In the coordinated regional development strategy, regions will work out policies according to their regional characteristics, which however, may result in market segmentation. By building a unified, interconnected and hierarchical spatial planning system across the country, we will achieve the "integration of multiple regulations" to solve the problem of low degree of market integration. Third, we will improve the incentive mechanism and promote joint space governance. The current assessment and incentive mechanism is mainly to encourage the development of individual region, lacking a unified, overall and hierarchical incentive mechanism. In order to build a unified domestic market whilst advancing coordinated regional development, it is necessary to work out a unified (national), integrated (peer regions) and hierarchical (upper-level and lower-level regions) incentive mechanism for joint space governance.
Issued on April 21, 2022
Yan Yingen, professor of School of Economics, Nanjing Audit University