Revenues in the general public budgets in Nanjing City totaled 89.71 billion yuan in the first half of the year, up 0.5 percent and the highest growth in Jiangsu Province, completing 54.5 percent of the figure budgeted earlier this year, said the Nanjing Finance Bureau on July 13.
Expenditures in the city’s general public budgets amounted to 86.6 billion yuan, up 1.2 percent. Among the expenditures, the city spent 65.3 billion yuan to improve people’s livelihood, and spending for social security, employment and healthcare all rose by 15 percent on average.
After the outbreak of the COVID-19, Nanjing’s financial authority took swift action to study and establish the emergency response mechanism, optimizing the financial work procedures from four aspects – fund approval, disbursement, material procurement, supervision and management. It also opened two fast-tracks – Centralized Treasury Payment and government procurement of pandemic response materials.
In the first half of the year, Nanjing arranged 1.23 billion yuan as the guarantee fund to support coronavirus prevention and control and another 1.55 billion yuan from the medical insurance funds to boost the pandemic response in a coordinated manner.
During the period, Nanjing reduced taxes of about 16.6 billion yuan, lowered fees by 32.18 million yuan, and exempted social insurance premiums of 10.9 billion yuan for nearly 160,000 insured units. The city waived the payment of social insurance premiums for large enterprises for six months and SMEs until the end of the year, which added up to 24 billion yuan over the year.
To support the resumption of work and production, Nanjing has also introduced a series of financial support policy and implementation guidelines, with more efforts to help SMEs hit hard by the pandemic. The Nanjing Innovation and Entrepreneurship Loans program expanded the service to reach more companies with a longer period of discounted interest rates. Furthermore, the ten measures specially introduced to help SMEs have involved the subsidy totaling 2.44 billion yuan.