SHENZHEN rolled out a slew of new measures to support the development of the private economy Tuesday.

The city aims to reduce costs for private enterprises by at least 100 billion yuan (US$14.7 billion) by the end of this year, according to a government notice issued Tuesday.

It will increase bank loans by 100 billion yuan to ease the difficulties of small and micro enterprises in obtaining bank loans.

The city will also expand the amount in the capital pool set up by the government to mitigate banks’ risks in extending loans to small and micro enterprises from the current 2 billion yuan to 5 billion yuan, and beneficiaries will also be expanded to cover self-employed small business owners.

The city will facilitate the issuance of bonds worth a total of 100 billion yuan by private enterprises and set up a 100-billion-yuan fund to help ease liquidity risks for publicly traded firms that have pledged shares as collateral for loans.

The city aims to encourage 1,000 small and micro industrial enterprises to grow into enterprises above a designated size by granting 100,000 yuan rewards to each enterprise that qualifies.

It will designate a group of 10,000 innovative private enterprises within three years, who will be given priority by the city government in policy and financial support.

The city will also recognize the top 100 private enterprises and provide support in land use and project approval to aid  their development.

It will heavily promote cloud services for private enterprises and build a batch of cloud service platforms and cloud experience centers for 10,000 private businesses by 2020.

The city also unveiled a package of rules in February aimed at improving the business environment by referring to the practices of Singapore and Hong Kong. This July, unified and simplified certificates were issued to business entities and approvals were streamlined.

By the end of October, the number of business entities in the city had reached 3.07 million, an increase of 3.2 percent over the previous year.

The private sector plays an important role in the Chinese economy, contributing more than 50 percent of tax revenue, 60 percent of GDP, 70 percent of technological innovation, 80 percent of urban employment and 90 percent of new jobs and new firms, according to the Ministry of Commerce last month.

(Wang Jingli)