Getting it Right: Financing Urban Development in China

This paper is a brief review of some issues in urban finance facing China’s larger cities. It argues that at present many key aspects of the ways in which local and metropolitan governments finance infrastructure and services in China seem to be both too obscure for proper accountability and too perverse for efficient use of scarce urban land and capital. Given the importance of urban areas for sustained national development, it is important to get urban finance “right” in the sense of providing the right signals to both public and private actors in urban development. Some suggestions are made on how this might perhaps be done by better designed user charges, property taxes, and other instruments.