From the Financial Times (link)
China is abandoning most numerical economic targets from its decades-old planning system as part of an effort to change the country’s obsession with growth at the expense of social programmes and the environment.
The National Development and Reform Commission, the chief planning agency, said economic targets in the country’s latest five-year plan, released on Monday, had been pared back to give “greater play to market forces”.
Only two economic targets have been included in the plan – an ongoing promise to double per capita gross domestic product in the 10 years to 2010 and a pledge to reduce energy consumption per unit of output in the five years to the end of the decade.
Ma Kai, the commission chairman, said at the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress: “Our economic growth may be increasing but we would like to know the environmental price we are paying to achieve it.”
