The executive meeting of the State Council on March 18 set out the tasks for this year’s economic system reform and confirmed its three directions.

First, further promote reforms in streamlining administration and delegating power, optimizing service and key industries, and increase systems and mechanism to help reduce overcapacity, storage, leverage and cost.

Second, make bigger strides in reforms related to education, medical care and health, pension and new-type urbanization to improve people’s lives, and beef up system innovation and perfect the mechanism in basic public service’s input and income distribution.

Third, strengthen supervision to guard against hidden risks in crucial sectors such as food security, environment protection, and finance.

Chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission Xu Shaoshi said that structural problems are the main obstacle among the various difficulties and risks that China’s development is facing.

Innovation in supply needs to be strengthened and the direction of structural reform needs to be confirmed to motivate enterprises’ vitality and customers’ potential, Xu said.

We can use some macroeconomic policy adjustments to win time, but the more fundamental thing is to comprehensively promote economic structure reform, transform economic development methods and solve the deep-rooted structural problems of our economy to achieve sustainable development, said Liu Wei, president of China’s Renmin University.