Shanghai reforms help China rise on World Bank's 'doing business' ranking

By accelerating its business environment reforms, Shanghai has helped China to further improve the World Bank's "doing business" ranking between 2018 to 2020, according to a new World Bank report, "China's Doing Business Success: Drivers of Reforms and Opportunities for the Future", released on Monday.

Over the past two years, China has moved from the 78th place to 31st in 2020, the report said. Shanghai accounts for 55 percent of China's weight in the World Bank's report. Following a city-wide meeting to mobilize the business reform agenda at the end of 2017, business reform became the top priority of Shanghai municipal government, the World Bank said. In 2018 Shanghai put in place more than 40 reform tasks and policies and 20 online administrative processing systems. The city launched two more business environment reform schemes in 2019 and early 2020, covering in total 188 reform tasks under local jurisdiction and 58 reform policies.

The reform agenda in Shanghai also included major reform tasks underlying the national "Fang Guan Fu" reform initiative, including opening up market access in finance, modern services and advanced manufacturing industries, strengthening intellectual property rights protection, providing tailored services to businesses and increasing support to small and medium-sized enterprises.

Shanghai has seen an increase in entrepreneurship. About 2.2 million firms were registered in Shanghai by the end of 2019. About 367,620 new firms were set up in the year, growing by about 8 percent annually. There are currently more than 2.5 million market entities in Shanghai, which means that one in every 10 people in Shanghai is a business owner. Statistics from the municipal government showed that Shanghai attracted 6,168 new foreign investment projects from February to November in 2019, which was more than 33 percent up year-on-year. At least $17.8 billion in new foreign investment was in place during the monitored period, up 10 percent from a year earlier, and Shanghai has largely improved administrative efficiency, the World Bank said. The city made it easier to do business by setting up the nation's first "single window portal", integrating city-wide cross-agency government services through block chain, big data and other digital technologies.