Central gov't budgets still need to be clearer

Official cars at a government office in Zhejiang province are all foreign-brand vehicles. The central government plans to restrict the purchase of official vehicles to domestic brands. Zhang Heping / For China Daily

On Friday, over 90 departments of the central government and central leading body of the Communist Party of China published their detailed budgets for the 2015 financial year as required by the new budget law. Comments:

In previous years, some central departments boasted their budgets were detailed because they contained where they had spent total sums of money, such as the amount spent in total on human resources. This year, progress has been made because they clearly list how much was spent on wages and how much on staff welfare. Obviously, the latter version is more welcomed by the public. We hope they make further progress next year by listing clearly what welfare their staff get and make the money traceable.

Beijing News, April 18

The new budgets are much better than previous ones, but most of them lack a piece of key information, namely how many employees each department has. Without that information, it is impossible to calculate how much money they spend on their staff on average and evaluate whether the spending is appropriate. Why not introduce the same form for all central departments, which requires inputting such key information, so that such information can't easily be hidden?

eastday.com, April 19

A glance at the budgets shows that the cost of public-funded cars has dropped by 16.2 percent, faster than that of the total cost. That would have been impossible without the reform of public-funded cars last year, which subsidizes officials instead of providing cars and drivers for them. It also shows that the attempt to cut spending by officials needs support from the central leadership in order to succeed.

Bai Jingming, vice-director of the Research Institute for Fiscal Science under the Ministry of Finance, April 17