By Li Shantong, Department of Development Strategy and Regional Economy, DRC & Han Kezi, Tsinghua University

Research Report No. 194, 2017 (Total 5269) 2017-12-25

Abstract: The five-year plan for national economic and social development is a strategic and comprehensive guideline and the improvement of the evaluation system for national five-year plan is an inexorable trend for fully enhancing the smooth implementation and advance of different development plans during China’s 13th Five-Year Plan period and pushing ahead with the law-based governance of the country. Due to the fact that China’s theoretical framework is incomplete, the law-based regulations are inadequate and the evaluation system is inappropriate, some urgent and critical problems remain to be solved in the evaluation work of national five-year plan such as the organization models, evaluation methods, evaluation indexes, evaluation procedures and accountability mechanism. These issues have exerted a negative impact on the authoritative evaluation of development plans and the outcome of implementation. In order to improve the evaluation system of China’s five-year plan for national economic and social development, we need to focus more effort on theoretical research, accelerate the formulation of legislative stipulations for development plans, foster independent third-party evaluation entities, enhance the full cycle evaluation of development plans, enforce the evaluation of related plans and the relevant accountability mechanism and encourage the public to participate in the evaluation of various development plans.

Key words: development plans, evaluation of plans, evaluation practice