Guiyang tops provincial list for business environment

Guiyang -- capital city of Southwest China's Guizhou province -- ranked number one for its business environment in 2020, the second year in a row it had done so, according to a recent evaluation of the province.

Last year, the metropolis improved its government affairs service by introducing online applications for all areas and the 100 most-processed government affairs categories now only require one trip to the administration hall.

All 53 municipal government departments can be accessed at the government affairs service hall -- and 80.1 percent of administrative matters can be handled at just one service window.

The time for examination and approval of construction projects was reduced to less than 80 working days and companies can now be registered in one working day.

Guiyang's market competition environment has been liberalized, even as the city has boosted market supervision. In 2020, Guiyang canceled 11,607 regulations, normative documents and policies. In addition, it standardized intermediary services for companies and rectified government department charging rates for companies.

Guiyang's business environment has also become more accessible and friendly to investment. The city has established eight funds to support industrial innovation and provided targeted financial services for companies, with a policy-based credit loan risk compensation fund pool.

To date, the fund pool has issued 8.69 billion yuan ($1.34 billion) of loans to 17,503 market entities.