To promote new infrastructure, ecological and environmental infrastructure must not be limited

It is important to emphasize that the ecological environment and sustainable development will play an increasingly important role in future investment decisions. Infrastructure construction consumes a lot of capital, resources, environment, energy, manpower and other factors, if excessive or too advanced, it will bring high cost, low utilization rate, overcapacity and other negative effects. However, ecological and environmental infrastructure is strong in public welfare and has always been in a state of serious shortage of supply, which should be the focus of infrastructure in the near and medium term to make up for weak spots.

At present, in China's new infrastructure investment plan, the share of ecological environmental infrastructure is small, and the seven key areas of new infrastructure mentioned by the state are not listed, except for new energy charging piles, other typical ecological environmental infrastructure. In order to implement the new infrastructure development strategy, in the publicly announced key project investment plans of the provinces in 2020, the proportion of ecological environmental infrastructure increased from 2.6% in 2019 to 6.9% in February 2020. Despite the increase of 4.3 percentage points, the share is still low.

At the same time, the return on investment mechanism of ecological and environmental infrastructure remains to be improved. At present, the construction of ecological environmental infrastructure is still dominated by government investment, the charging mechanism is not perfect, and the indirect pulling effect on economic growth is not obvious or difficult to identify. The systematic and scientific nature of project planning needs to be improved, supporting policies such as feasibility study, environmental assessment, energy assessment, land pre-examination, and planning land permission lag behind, and the preliminary reserve work of the project is insufficient, resulting in poor landing performance, and it is difficult to attract social capital investment.

3. Enhance the role of ecological and environmental infrastructure in driving economic growth

To practice the concept of ecological civilization and promote high-quality economic development, ecological and environmental infrastructure construction should be incorporated into the new infrastructure system, and local governments should be guided to increase the share of ecological and environmental infrastructure in the implementation of projects. To this end, the author proposes to implement it from the aspects of financing, enhancing economic impetus, and reserve projects:

We will increase the proportion of investment in ecological and environmental infrastructure in new infrastructure investment. Relevant data show that in 2018, the national general public budget spent about 2.09 trillion yuan on major infrastructure projects, of which urban and rural community public facilities, low-income housing projects, transportation facilities, pollution prevention and control, and water conservancy projects accounted for 49.1%, 17.7%, 12.0%, 11.7%, and 9.5%, respectively. It is necessary to strengthen infrastructure investment toward ecological and environmental infrastructure, and reserve more development space for the seriously lagging supply of ecological and environmental infrastructure. Given that fiscal infrastructure investment is mainly achieved by issuing government bonds, it is recommended that local governments, when issuing general bonds and special bonds, ensure a substantial increase in investment in ecological infrastructure such as domestic sewage and solid waste treatment.

We will enhance the role of ecological and environmental infrastructure in driving economic growth. A beautiful ecological environment can play an important role in attracting people to settle down and buy homes, and strengthening cultural tourism. When planning investment projects and PPP projects, local governments can bundle the construction of ecological environmental infrastructure and development projects, so that the environmental benefits generated by ecological infrastructure projects can win economic spillover benefits for development projects, and the development projects can pay the cost of ecological infrastructure projects to maximize the overall benefits. At the same time, it is suggested to strengthen the research work on ecological environmental infrastructure and improve the level of decision-making, planning and implementation.

We will accelerate the reserve of ecological and environmental infrastructure projects. Under the promotion of the new infrastructure policy, the departments and areas with a good reserve foundation should have relatively more projects and funds implemented. In order to meet the urgent needs of ecological and environmental infrastructure to make up for weaknesses, it is recommended that relevant administrative departments guide local governments to formulate ecological and environmental infrastructure construction and investment and financing plans in accordance with national and regional ecological and environmental protection plans, with domestic sewage and solid waste disposal as the focus, and clarify the annual project implementation list and financing plan in the past five years. Do a good job in advance of the preliminary work of the project to be implemented in the past two years, and reserve the preliminary preparation costs, organize experts to carry out scientific demonstration, and win valuable time and opportunities for the rapid and good promotion of ecological environmental infrastructure construction.