The Comparison Of Prefecture-level City's Investment Environments Of Hebei And Shandong Provinces

Hebei is an opening province in the eastern coast of China,belonging to the provinces that opened earlier in the eastern coast areas.After decades of construction,Hebei Province acquired substantial developments in the economic,social and cultural aspects.In November 2006,Hebei Provincial Committee Party called people in Hebei province to plan to use 15 years building the stronger province in economic and social development in the seventh party congress of Hebei province.The Government Working Report on the Fifth Session of the Tenth National People's Congress of Hebei Province made building stronger province in economic and social development as the province's economic development strategy.However,we should see that there is still a big gap of economic and social development compared with the well-developed coastal provinces.For instance,compared with Shandong Province,our province has a little gap with Shandong province in the geographical environment,population,area,energy,natural resources.Our province and Shandong province are all around Beijing and Tianjin,have the same economic open-door policy in Bohai Bay region,and have a number of port cities.According to this condition,the level of economic development and attracting foreign investment of the two provinces should be roughly the same,but after comparing the level of economic development and the actual utilization of foreign capital quantity of the two provinces over the past five years,we found significant differences between them.The GDP of Shandong province is almost double of GDP in Hebei province.The actual utilization of foreign investment in Shandong Province is four or five times of Hebei Province.In such circumstances,how can we improve the investment environment in Hebei Province to promote the investment and speed up the construction of an economically-strong coastal province become an important topic we need to study.In order to identify the deficiencies of investment environment of Hebei province,we compared their investment environment and found that they are not very different in the overall investment environment.We have further analyzed foreign capital condition and investment environment of 28 prefecture-level cities of Hebei Province and Shandong Province to identify each city's problem in investment environment and put forward corresponding effective proposals.This paper designed a more comprehensive,comparable stronger investment environment evaluation system based on the reference of many domestic and foreign-related research results,using AHP to calculate the various weights.We also collected the data of all prefecture-level city's investment environment indicators in Hebei Province and Shandong Province of the past five years,calculated 28 prefecture-level city's investment environment index of Hebei Province and Shandong Province in nearly 5 years.Then,we compared the investment environment of 28 cities and found that the first-six cities with best investment environment in 2006 are:Qingdao,Jinan,Zibo,Tangshan, Shijiazhuang,and Yantai.We have also made the focus group discussions and put forward the practical policy recommendations for city in Hebei Province to improve the investment environment by means of sub-scale group and geographic location group.These suggestions include improving all prefecture-level cities in Hebei Province's investment in the hard environment and soft environment,and counter-measures of improving hardware envirionment.It mainly refers to speeding up economic development,improving condition of traffic and transportation,improving basic facilities of cities and improving nature and housing conditions.The proposals of improving software environment of cities include developing government's function,enhancing government's efficiency,enhancing cities'cultrual propagation and strengthening realization of attracting investment.Finally,we propose to seize the opportunity of Hebei Caofeidian's construction and the "big three changed" policy to accelerate economic development and improve the urban environment in order to speed up the province's coastal economic development.