Op-Ed Contributors

Development plan has global significance

(China Daily)
Updated: 2011-03-17 08:01

Experts around the world are busy reading China's new Five-Year Plan (2011-2015), a detailed national development strategy for the coming years that has both domestic and global significance.

That the plan is in the spotlight is the result of globalization and China's growing economic strength and its efforts to lead the world's economic recovery after the global financial crisis.

Concluding its annual session, the National People's Congress (NPC) of China on Monday endorsed the 12th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development in 2011-2015, which proposes that China should promote scientific development and accelerate the transformation of the pattern of economic development.

The plan also urges greater efforts to ensure and improve people's livelihoods, and promote long-term, steady and rapid economic development and social harmony and stability.

"By 2015, China will be a fairer, greener society," Reuters said in an article last week on why the world should heed the plan.

The article highlighted in particular China's goal of building 10 million homes for low-income people in 2011 and 36 million by 2015.

It quoted Andy Rothman, a strategist with Asia's leading brokerage and investment group CLSA, who said he was "completely convinced that they're going to spend a hell of a lot of money on affordable housing this year."

Meanwhile, The Guardian newspaper in the UK considered China's pledge of building houses for the poor an opportunity for businesses in other countries as well.

"The size of the market means that the world needs to be paying attention because what happens in the Chinese property market affects everything from steel outputs in Brazil to iron ore exports from Australia," it quoted Duncan Innes-Ker of the Economist Intelligence Unit as saying.