"Boss' Difficulties" Reform of Housing Provident Fund System
China News Weekly Reporter/Su Jiede
Published in the 951th issue of China News Weekly on 2020.6.15
The reform of the housing provident fund system has once again released a clear signal.
On May 18, the "Opinions of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council on Accelerating the Improvement of the Socialist Market Economic System in the New Era" (hereinafter referred to as "Opinions") were published, and the "Opinions" proposed reform of the housing provident fund system. Minister of Housing and Urban-Rural Development Wang Menghui also published an article in the "People's Daily", listing "Revision of the Regulations on Housing Provident Fund Management and Reform and Improvement of the Housing Provident Fund System" as one of this year's key tasks.
The housing provident fund system needs to be reformed, not abolished, which has pressed the pause button for the dispute over the housing provident fund system that has been popular in recent times.
"The key to the problem now is how to build, rather than simply canceling the matter." Liu Hongyu, director of the Institute of Real Estate of Tsinghua University, told China News Weekly that the housing provident fund system has played a role in the reform of China's urban housing system and the improvement of residents' housing conditions. The role of is obvious to all, and its problems and defects are also fully studied. "Many views in recent discussions have been studied seven years ago, and many are still scientific quantitative research."
With the controversy along the way, the cumulative deposit of housing provident funds has also expanded from the initial tens of billions to trillions and ten trillions. The "cake" is getting bigger and bigger, and the problem is becoming more and more prominent. There have been many versions of the reform plan for the housing provident fund system. Why hasn't it been promoted obviously?
"Each plan may satisfy 80% of the people, but the other 20% don't buy it. It's difficult to do things. The reform is stuck here." Chen Jie, director of the Shanghai Jiaotong University Housing and Urban-Rural Construction Research Center, told China News Weekly "The longer the problem is dragged on, the more difficult the reform will be.
How to benefit the new citizens of the city?
During the two sessions this year, Zheng Bingwen, member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and director of the World Social Security Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, wrote that since the establishment of the provident fund system, 33.35 million personal housing loans have been issued (including 2 sets of loans for more than 2 times), a total of about 55 million people. Benefited, of the 144 million paid employees, 38% became housing lenders.
However, an academic who did not wish to be named was very cryptic about the information about the housing provident fund released every year, and believed that the data covered up the problem of "robbing the poor and helping the rich".
He believes that in 2018, the housing provident fund personal housing loan data showed that the amount of low- and middle-income loans accounted for 94.86%, and the high-income amount was 5.14%. The housing provident fund report stipulates that high income means that the income is more than three times the average wage of the local society last year, and low income is less than double. The number of loans for low-income, low-middle-income, middle-income, and high-income earners is different. The report does not give clear data. In the view of the above scholars, based on the average income, it is difficult to see the full picture of the efficiency of housing provident fund utilization.
"The demand group is mismatched, and the current housing provident fund is mainly paid by state agencies, public institutions and employees of state-owned enterprises. Most of these employees have solved the housing problem. However, many private enterprise employees, young workers and migrant workers who need to solve the housing problem, many None of them are covered by the system." Liu Zhifeng, the former deputy minister of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, mentioned at a meeting.
According to Wang Lina, a researcher at the Institute of Finance of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the real housing shortages are the new urban citizens—newly employed young people, and migrant workers who move between cities. This huge special housing savings fund is still very important for solving the housing problems of new urban residents in the future urbanization. The housing provident fund business should change from the single issuance of personal loans to the construction of rental housing and affordable housing.
At the end of the last century, urban residents faced the problem of no money and no room, and the housing provident fund system came into being. A similar scene happened today with new citizens in the city. At the time, Zhang Qiguang, director of the Housing Provident Fund Supervision Department of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, wrote in 2015 that the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development surveyed that less than 1% of rural residents in urban areas buy houses in urban areas, and most of them live in shantytowns, urban villages and buildings. Construction site, poor living conditions.
"Many new farmers entering the city, as long as they are willing and have a stable job, individuals can also contribute to the provident fund." Wang Lina told "China News Weekly" that the provident fund management department also accepted this recommendation. However, in actual implementation, the housing provident fund system is still difficult to cover groups such as farmers entering the city.
Zhang Qiguang believes that this group is huge and cannot be supported by financial investment alone. It needs migrant workers, employment units and the national "three families to lift": the migrant workers are included in the housing provident fund system, part of the individual deposits, part of the unit subsidies, part of the state support, accumulation In the first installment of urban housing purchase, low-interest loans will be provided by the National Housing Bank, and subsequent repayments will be made with housing provident funds.
Focusing on solving the housing problem of new citizens, financial services are essential. Liu Qiao and Zhang Zheng, professors at Guanghua School of Management at Peking University, believe that it is necessary to support rental housing, provide supply-side financial services, and provide more high-quality affordable rental housing supply. Specific models can include funding for the construction of new rental housing; funding for asset renewal and revitalization of stock assets; funding for the cultivation of high-quality rental housing operation and management companies; application of private real estate guidance funds, real estate investment trust funds (REITs) and other financial Ways to form a benign closed loop for investment and financing.
In addition, more and more funds are deposited in the housing provident fund account, and how to maintain and increase the value of the money on the book has also become the focus. Zheng Bingwen told "China News Weekly" that the current employee housing provident fund payment deposit interest is too low, "10 years ago, 100,000 yuan can buy a house, current deposits can be stored for 30 years, can you buy it now? With such low interest rates, people’s money is depreciating there."
Institutional dilemma of localized administration
The housing provident fund system involves individuals, enterprises and the government, and the whole body is moved in one go, and the reform is struggling. Among them, how to coordinate the interests of the departments is the biggest difficulty in reform.
In the early days of reform and opening up, urban housing has become an increasingly urgent practical problem. In 1991, the per capita housing area of urban residents was about 7 square meters, equivalent to an increase of less than 0.3 square meters per year in the 13 years since the reform and opening up, and the increase in area was less than a schoolbag.
At that time, the main factor restricting the construction of houses was the lack of funds. In the past, in the welfare housing-sharing era, it was impossible to rely on financial funds to improve housing conditions. In 1991, Zhu Mayji, then the mayor of Shanghai, presided over the Shanghai housing reform and used the experience of Singapore to launch the housing provident fund system, which will become a national policy in the future.
Chen Jie told "China News Weekly" that the housing provident fund system solved the core problem of housing reform-how to provide a stable, long-term and cheap source of housing investment and consumption funds for employees.
The real estate industry is developing rapidly, and the housing provident fund deposit has also increased dramatically. In 1994, the housing provident fund system was implemented nationwide, and the national housing provident fund was 11 billion yuan. By 2018, the national housing provident fund deposit totaled 14.59 trillion yuan, and the deposit balance was 5.79 trillion yuan, an increase of more than a thousand times.
The management mechanism corresponding to such a huge amount is not perfect.
Zhang Qiguang wrote in 1997 that the decision-making agency and the executive agency were set up separately, drawing on the basic experience of the Singapore provident fund system, the policy-making agency formulated policies, and the execution agency was responsible for the specific operation and management. The executing agency must be an independent institution and cannot be directly managed by the government department, otherwise it will be restricted by the interests of the department.
However, his vision did not become a reality. In 2002, the former Department of Housing and Real Estate of the Ministry of Construction added the name of the Department of Housing Provident Fund Supervision and Management, specifically undertaking the national housing provident fund supervision and management work. Also in this year, the "Regulations on the Management of Housing Provident Fund" were revised and passed.
At the beginning of the establishment of the system, Zhang Qiguang believed that the housing provident fund management institution bears a large number of long-standing creditor's rights and debt liabilities, and the institution must be an independent legal entity. However, the vast majority of management institutions are affiliated with a certain department, and are not independent legal entity units and cannot bear civil liability, which is far from the management requirements of the housing provident fund.
The problems gradually emerged after the shortcomings of this system.
Wang Lina believes that the housing provident fund management center is located in public institutions, and it is difficult to build a legal person governance structure and risk restriction mechanism suitable for the provident fund operation. The localization management of public accumulation metals has caused the shortage of funds and the coexistence of precipitation, which has reduced the efficiency of fund use. The legal relationship between the provident fund depositors and the management center is unclear, resulting in unclear legal attribution of the provident fund value-added income, irregular distribution, and infringement of the depositor's interests.
Due to the localized management of the housing provident fund, all localities regard it as their own one-third of an acre, and it is difficult to achieve national unified management like social security. "There is not enough money in the place you need, and there is no surplus in place. We have submitted a reform project plan, but we have not made a breakthrough." Chen Jie said.
Wang Lina said that the characteristics of finance are the liquidity and efficiency of funds, but the administrative management is localized, the funds are managed, and there is no system. The places where funds are lacking and the places where funds are surplus cannot complement each other, and it is difficult to establish a linkage mechanism. .
Liu Qiao and Zhang Zheng suggested that we should focus on solving the restriction of the localization of provident fund management on the flow of employed people, and establish information sharing and policy coordination between cities.
In order to break the status quo of this segmentation, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development organized the development of a national housing provident fund transfer and connection platform in 2017, which will make it possible to withdraw funds from different places. However, during the implementation of the policy, various localities once introduced measures to increase the difficulty of remote extraction, and the problem of fragmentation is difficult to resolve.
Last year, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development and other departments had brewed a new reform policy, but ultimately did not introduce it. Chen Jie said that according to the New Deal, at least regional coordination should be strengthened. There are many solutions, but the problem has not been solved. Chen Jie said: "The housing provident fund must at least look like a finance; like social security, it can achieve national co-ordination."
How to design financial reform?
The reform plan is difficult to land, what is the problem? In Liu Hongyu's view, the core positioning of the current housing provident fund system is still unclear-it also has the positioning of housing finance and housing security, but the target groups under different positioning are different. The target groups of housing finance are mainly middle and high-income groups The main objective of housing security is to improve the purchasing power and housing conditions of low-income groups. Many of the current debates stem from this unclear core positioning.
Liu Qiao believes that from a longer time dimension, the housing provident fund system is facing a problem of how to re-start, re-position, and thus be able to play a greater role.
A reform plan proposed by Wang Lina in 2008 was to reorganize the provident fund center into a policy housing cooperative bank, but it was not adopted. Many people believe that the timing of this plan is not yet mature. At that time, there was also an important plan to merge housing provident funds into the social security system together with pension, medical care and unemployment. In early June 2009, the Guangzhou Housing Provident Fund Management Center had brewed a housing provident fund new deal, but the controversy was too great and ended in vain.
In 2010, some local governments proposed to introduce housing provident fund balances as support for medium and long-term construction loans in the field of affordable housing construction funds, and the housing provident fund amendments will be put on the agenda.
Chen Jie introduced that the government provided part of the housing provident fund to finance the security housing. At that time, it wanted to show the public welfare of the housing provident fund system and improve the income through loans. "However, the regulations of the housing public fund stipulate that the deposit funds belong to the individual and the housing The financing method conflicts with the regulations. If you want to make public loans, the regulations will have to be revised. How to amend the regulations will be disputed by all parties. Later, we found that the use of provident funds to distribute loans has a relatively high regulatory risk and was later suspended."
Chen Jie advocates gradual reform. The short-term reform plan is to open up enterprise annuities and housing provident funds, and then gradually transform into policy finance, focusing on housing provident funds for more than ten years. Wang Lina most regretted that in 2014, the country carried out large-scale urban old houses. Renovation, "That's a good time to do policy finance. However, a report from the China Development Bank was submitted, and it took away market share." That year, the China Development Bank's Residential Finance Division was approved to open by the original CBRC. Wang Lina said that as a financial institution, the National Development Bank can obtain a lot of funds by issuing bonds, which is lacking in the housing provident fund system.
In fact, from 2011 to 2014, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development proposed to amend the "Provisions on the Management of Housing Provident Funds" almost every year, and has repeatedly stated that the revision of the draft manuscript will be completed within the year, but all of them have ended with a good contract. In 2015, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development once again tried to revise laws and regulations. This year, Zhang Qiguang wrote that the conditions for establishing a national housing bank in my country have been basically mature. The statements and remarks of the relevant leaders of the industry authorities have aroused great concern from all walks of life. People once thought this was a reform plan for the housing provident fund system. However, the regulations were only fine-tuning in the end, and Zhang Qiguang's plan was not implemented. A housing provident fund researcher who declined to be named revealed that "Zhang Qiguang's plan should be inconsistent with the ideas of the ministries and commissions and difficult to be adopted."
Regardless of the reform plan, financialization of this trillion-dollar institution is an unavoidable direction.
"We have put forward proposals for the financialization of the provident fund management reform for at least 10 years. There has been no movement. One important reason is the contradiction of departmental interests. Once the housing provident fund gets a financial license through the management agency, it will be subject to the management of the China Banking Regulatory Commission "Wang Lina said, but for those who are accustomed to the current administrative management system, there will be a lot of discomfort, so there are great differences in the financial reform in the provident fund system, and the difficulty can be imagined.
"The provident fund management agency is transformed into a policy housing financial institution, but it is not necessarily a national housing bank. It can be a mutual housing savings bank, a housing fund, etc. In other words, a policy housing financial institution is not necessarily a wholly state-owned capital, except for governments at all levels Financial institutions, powerful enterprises, provident fund managers and depositors can all become shareholders, and mixed ownership is conducive to amplifying the function of state-owned capital and stimulating the vitality of private capital." This is the reform plan for the housing provident fund system proposed by Wang Lina before and after retirement. For the recent controversy, she still believes that this plan is effective, the key is how to land.
"China News Weekly" No. 21, 2020
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