Analysis of Policy Tools for the Governance of Streamlining Administration and Delegating Power, Improving Regulation, and Upgrading Services in China's Pilot Free Trade Zones

Abstract

The pilot free trade zone is China's institutional innovation experimental field and the governance of streamlining administration and delegating power, improving regulation, and upgrading services is the core of China's government management reform. This paper took the overall plans of China's 12 pilot free trade zones as the analysis objects, and used R language and social network analysis methods to explore the focus of the governance and divided the policy tools for it into three categories. The study found that the three types of policy tools in China's 11 free trade zones are mainly characterized by decentralization to the market and society, strengthening credit rating-based regulation and optimizing intellectual property services. There are problems such as insufficient empowerment of the free trade zone government, limited attention to the rule of law and fairness, and narrow coverage of public services. The study also analyzed the relative differences in the policy tools between Hainan free trade zone and other 11 free trade zones, and proposes to make the three types of policy tools coherent and optimize specifically to promote collaborative governance of streamlining administration and delegating power, improving regulation, and upgrading services and improve its ability of the free trade zone government effectively. Keywords—The pilot free trade zone; Governance; Policy tools;