Archives of Peking University News - PKU English - 北京大学

北京大学英语新闻网/Peking University News
David Dollar Speech on Investment
Climate and Competitiveness
By Guo Xiaoqian
PKU NEWS 2004—12—03
http://ennews.pku.edu.cn/news.php?s=102297956
Peking University, Beijing, Dec. 3rd, 2004: Mr. David Dollar, World Bank bureau
chief in China and Mongolia, delivered a speech on investment climate and
competitiveness based on a survey of 23 Chinese cities and other developing
countries this in Guanghua School of Management, Peking University this afternoon.
During the 45-minute speech, Mr. Dollar first pointed out that global growth had
shifted to developing countries in the past fifteen years and developing countries had
become the main actor in the play of modern globalization. This year they have
welcomed the fastest growth in more than 30 years and the boom is expected to last
longer. Next by showing a series of statistics due to the survey he did back in the
United States, he mainly focused on the international trade of developing countries.
On the whole these countries show a positive development and China displays the
most rapid growth with 71% while Pakistan is the lowest one with 0%, not to mention
those African countries.
From the above analysis it was clear that under the overall prosperity, variations and
imbalance still exist, even within Asia. Reasons for these phenomena are
complicated and one of them is investment climate. Mr. Dollar then gave more
details on it including institutional and regulatory environment for firms, measure at
the firm level through objective indicators and large random samples of firms in
common sectors (garments, TV sets…) with standardized questionnaire. The
questionnaire has been handed out among approximately 4,000 firms located in 23
cities in mainland China and inquiries contains the following aspects: losses due to
poor infrastructure, labor market indicators, effective tax rate and access to finance.
He classified all the cities into 6 ranks with Shanghai and Hangzhou on the top and
some interior cities such as Guiyang at the bottom. Though the leading cities in
China create a reasonably good investment climate compared with those in other
developing countries, almost all the cities have room to improve. He especially
pointed out financial system as a universal weakness in China and the difference
climate within the nation was largely due to the local government‘s attitude towards
investors. He believed that there would be a significant improvement by taking steps
to solve the existing problems.
1114