China to Decontrol Prices of Water TransportationThe State Development Planning Commission and the Ministry of Communications have recently announced that the prices for passenger and freight transportation in waterways will be set free to be regulated by the market as from May 1.According to CCTV's report, all water transportation enterprises may fix their prices by themselves in accordance with their respective costs and market situation. However, the enterprises directly under the central management must submit their prices to the State Planning Commission and the Ministry of Communications for putting on files, while others to their respective departments concerned. The reason for decontrolling the prices as given by the person in charge of the Ministry of Communications is that currently, enterprises under the management of the central and local authorities have their respective prices set differently. And there are three ways for price setting in current water transportation, namely, the price fixed by the government, government-supervised price, and market-regulated price. The market-regulated price, as entered into force from May 1, will give full play to the leverage of prices on regulating the market resources so as to spur up the water transportation in China. After adopting the market-regulated price, all enterprises engaged in water transportation must abide by the price rules concerned and must publicize their new prices 30 days in advance except the contracted prices. And the local departments concerned have the rights to readjust the unreasonable new prices. By PD Online staff member Huang Ying |
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