Explainer: Whys and whats of China's unified domestic market

Highly efficient, rules-based, fair and open, its super large potential awaits unveiling

BEIJING－China has released a guideline to accelerate the establishment of a unified domestic market amid efforts to build a high-standard market system and promote high-quality development.

Such a market is a scarce resource in today's world, said an official with the National Development and Reform Commission. With a population of over 1.4 billion and a middle-income group of more than 400 million, China's super large-scale market is unique in the world.

China defines a unified domestic market as highly efficient, rules-based, fair and open. It will remove local protectionism, market segmentation, or impediments restricting economic circulation, thus facilitating the smooth flow of products and resources on a larger scale.

Why is China accelerating the establishment of such a market? Here is what you need to know:

What is a unified domestic market all about?

China wants an integrated market unified by the same system and rules, ensuring high-standard connectivity of market facilities and building highly unified sub-markets of factors and resources markets and goods and services markets. Supervision should be fair and unified across the market, with unfair competition and market intervention avoided.

A market with unified policies, regulations and standards for supervision can allocate resources efficiently to maximize social welfare, said Liu Zhibiao, director of the Yangtze Industrial Economic Institute of Nanjing University.

Free from the hindrance of institutional arrangements and human factors, barriers to entry and exit will be eliminated for domestic entities, while foreign countries will benefit on a reciprocal basis, facilitating the flow of resources, factors and products at low costs, Liu added.

Setting up such a market is crucial to consolidating the smooth circulation of the domestic economic system by further stimulating the domestic market's potential, said Guo Liyan, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Macroeconomic Research. Accordingly, domestic and international markets will be better connected, with regulations and standards more compatible and China's dual-circulation development paradigm enhanced.