Recently, during a State Council executive meeting, it was decided to fully practice list-based management for all items requiring administrative approval, by adopting the “List of Items Requiring Administrative Approval Set by Laws, Administrative Regulations and the State Council (2022 edition).” The meeting also required that all provinces, cities and counties should compile their own lists of items by the end of this year, covering all items requiring administrative regulations. Such lists have been available in previous years, but this meeting highlighted their “full practice” and declared the key issue of rescinding any “disguised” approvals. In particular, the meeting stated that “no administrative approval should be required or implemented against the law over any item outside the lists,” in an effort to tackle the “lists beyond lists,” a thorny issue in the reform of administrative approval. The central government has identified the problem and made a targeted solution, making the reform worth looking forward to.
The administrative approval reform is an essential measure to improve the business environment, stimulate market vitality and build a national unified market. It also helps define the boundary between the market and the government. This move pushes for further administrative approval reform, despite some tricky issues lying ahead. The top priority is to ensure that the reform is carried out in a sensible manner by all authorities at all levels according to the central government’s unified arrangements, allowing all items for administrative approval to be included in lists for management. This does not mean the end of administrative approval reform, but rather puts forward higher requirements for its continuation. It should be noted that at present, with the increasing downward pressure on the economy, the repeated rebound of the pandemic, and the imbalance between financial revenue and expenditure, eliminating administrative approval in disguised forms may more difficult than usual.
