(China Daily)
Updated: 2007-11-23 07:18

Rapid growth in the fiscal income of the State is encouraging and more of this money should be used to improve public welfare, says an article in Beijing Youth Daily. The following is an excerpt:

According to the Ministry of Finance, the annul income of the State is going to be 700 billion yuan ($92.1 billion) more than what was expected.

With an average growth of 20 percent in recent years, the State's income has been growing much faster than the income of the common people. Growth of the government's coffers should enable policymakers to offer more public services and improve social welfare.

However, it is worth discussing whether a 20 percent growth in the fiscal income every year is a bit too high for a developing country.

Following economic development in the last two decades, the State has accumulated considerable financial resources to support its administrative duties.

Our current social security scheme is far from perfect, and the redistribution of social wealth among different groups, which is supposed to be done by the government, is not fair enough.

So, it might be a good time now to leave more wealth in the hands of the common people, rather than collecting it through taxes. Too much concentration of wealth in the government might lower the efficiency of using the money to promote economic and social development.

After all, the market economy in our country is much more mature than it was and it could allocate more resources to the different sectors.

In General Secretary Hu Jintao's report to the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, he stressed that more support would be offered to improve people's lives, ensuring they get proper education, a decent salary for their work, medical care and old-age pension.

This may need more financial resources from the government, but more importantly, an improvement in the system of distribution of the wealth should be carried out.

(China Daily 11/23/2007 page10)