|
Letters and Blogs
(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-09-11 07:45 Affordable housing not to be binned The affordable housing scheme was designed to help urban low-income families, who are crowded out from the commercial housing market, to own living places of their own. The prices of affordable housing are capped by the government according to construction cost and consequently, are much lower than the commercial housing prices. Though it is a benign policy aiming to help the poor, fraud and scandals are rife in the distribution of them; and, a large chunk of affordable housing is usurped by the powerful social strata. Now some people are calling for its abolition. Local authorities and real estate developers seem to be lukewarm to build more affordable housing. Land transfer fees, i.e. the money earned by the government through selling land to developers, account for a large share of the local authorities' revenue. Allocating land for affordable housing projects, however, brings much less revenue to the local authorities than the same land used for commercial development. The same logic applies to the real estate developers, too. Though there are strident voices against affordable housing, and local governments and estate developers are reluctant to undertake more projects, affordable housing scheme should not be scrapped. What needs to be done is to make the procedure of distributing affordable housing fair and transparent, so that families in need really get the benefit of it. Xin Lu http://dmzhan.blog.sohu.com/130338187.html Concerns on merit pay system China's State Council recently announced its decision to push forward a merit pay system in public institutions cross the country. The introduction of the system is definitely a big step forward in stimulating staff initiative and improving public service performance. Yet given the complexity of the issue, we cannot but worry about the following concerns. First, merit pay should have a substantial share in an employee's total income. In contrast to regular pay, which is decided by seniority, education background and positions, merit pay is designated for stimulating workers' enthusiasm. A relatively higher weight of merit pay, 30 percent for example, will enhance working efficiency noticeably. Second, the criteria for evaluating merit should be reasonable. As far as I am concerned, a number of such criteria are doubtful. Take colleges for instance. The lecturers' performance is measured by their production of thesis and teaching hours - totally superficial in terms of the work they've done. At the same time, teaching performance, the ultimate quality of teachers, is not included. Thus, senior and experienced teachers who provide sufficient knowledge and inspire students through lectures take far lower payments than young teachers with higher education who publish loads of papers but are poor teachers. Third, as a complement to the merit pay system, it is imperative to eliminate incompetent employees in public sector. The fact that few people working for State-owned enterprises and institutions have been fired over the years only encourages laziness and procrastination at work. To encourage competition, cooperation and progress, public institutions should possess the right to dismiss employees who do not come up to the mark. To sum up, there is still a case for concrete effort to successfully introduce the merit pay system. Yan Fulei http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5f736a060100ezmg.html (China Daily 09/11/2009 page8) |
