Over the past two years, despite a world economy still struggling to fully recover, and downward domestic economic pressure, China’s economic growth maintained at a reasonable interval.

Streamlining administration and delegating powers to lower-level governments, appropriate government involvement in the market, and optimization of services served as the three engines to drive investment, consumption, and exports, three key aspects of the economy.

Drive investment

To drive investment one of the top priorities was to further streamline administration and delegate powers so that examination and approval procedures will be simplified, improving administrative efficiency and enabling more investment.

According to National Development and Reform Commission’s deputy chief Lian Weiliang, there are four steps to further deepen reform of investment and financing: first, overall streamlining and delegation; second, retooling of the administrative system to provide efficient and convenient services; third, easing market access to attract more social capital; fourth, constant supervision and regulation.

The method has proven effective as 3.3 trillion yuan (531.61 billion) was invested last year in key projects, and infrastructure investment rose 19.1 percent in the first half of 2015.

Shandong province is just one of many areas that have witnessed the improvement as it examined and approved a high-speed railway between Jinan and Qingdao cities in just 18 months. It used to take years for approval of such a project to be granted.

Start a new engine

To spur domestic demand, steps have been taken to stimulate commodity circulation and cultivate an environment for consumption.

The government has carried out trials on lowering import tariffs on daily consumer goods, increasing the number of duty-free shops, and expanding the range of duty-free commodities, offering more choices for domestic consumers.

It is also creating a safe consumption environment by cracking down on infringement and knockoffs on the Internet, building a commodity tracing system, and promoting business integrity.

To realize consumption potential, it focused on middle and low-income consumer groups by developing consumer finance, easing market access, and delegating examination and approval powers.

Create new advantages

With the aim of providing more convenient services and creating new advantages in foreign trade, the government has unveiled the following measures:

> Strengthening trade facilitation to reduce costs;

> Regulating import and export charges to relive companies’ financial burdens;

> Implementing export tax rebate classification management measures to provide an efficient tax rebate service;

> Optimizing import and export procedures of e-commerce commodities and implementing tax-rebates and tax-free policies on cross-border e-commerce retail products.

Huang Songping, spokesperson with the General Administration of Customs, said that China is transforming from a heavy reliance on general imports and exports to optimized imports and exports with more focus on high-end manufacturing and high value-added export products with the help of e-commerce and the “Belt and Road Initiative”.