Opinion

Tangled in new budgets

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-03-29 07:52

The 12 central government budgetary reports published by the Ministry of Finance on March 25 are a welcome step forward to increase transparency of China's public finances.

But while we applaud the effort to provide people with more detailed information of its budget, we also urge financial authorities to make these key budget numbers more readable for the majority of the people.

China's budgetary income exceeded 6.8 trillion yuan ($1,000 billion) last year, up 11.7 percent over the previous year due to the stronger-than-expected economic recovery.

Given the complexity of economic growth this year, the government has set a revenue growth target of only 6 percent for the central budget, which doesn't look very ambitious since it already saw a 32.9 percent growth year-on-year in fiscal revenue in the first two months of the year.

As the size of China's central and local government budgets expands steadily, it becomes more important than ever to make them more transparent to ensure financial efficiency.

The latest central budgetary reports will certainly help shed light on how the central government collects and spends its revenues.

But the difficulty for the public and media to make sense of all these budgetary numbers is very obvious and we don't think the government compilers of this data lack the professional knowledge to make the numbers simpler.