On The Improvement Of Public Participation Echanism Of Public Price Hearing In China

Public price hearing has been carried out for over15years and currently has become a big concern as a form of public participation. Through public price hearing, consumers, operators and stakeholders could have some voices in price decisions to make pubic price hearing more scientific and democratic.However, in practice, public price hearing are confronted with more and more problems and these shortcomings have not been solved effectively, affecting the enthusiasm of public participation, and even’ every listen will rise’ has become the synonym of public hearing. Under this circumstance, the government’s price decision is faced with the public trust crisis and the system of public price hearing is caught in a dilemma.The prominent problem of public price hearing is how to form an effective public participation mechanism, making the public be able to control their rights in the process of public price hearing and participate in the procedure of public price hearing rationally and effectively, and finally accomplish the mutual justice and equity. The provisions of Pricing Law of the People’s Republic of China are too principled while The Measures of National Government for Formulating Public Price Hearing and rules for the implementation by all local governments are comparatively detailing but not able to provide comprehensive, systematic and detailed operation guidance for the organizers of public price hearing. Due to this kind of deficiency, local governments have to make plenty of repeated elementary explorations in terms of many details of public price hearing in practice, greatly restricting the formation and development of the public participation mechanism. Besides, under the influence of Chinese system and tradition and the circumstance of lacking the basis of higher-level law or the approval of higher authorities, the ideas of "the less trouble the better" and "would rather handle less affairs than cause more troubles" restrict the vigor and efficiency of exploration and thus cause public price hearing keeps at a low level all the time and has difficulty in forming into an rational and effective public participation mechanism. Meanwhile, participants of public price hearing are also acted as the consumers, and their lack of ability gives to their low level of sense of participation, concept and skills and they are hard to acquire effective and reasonable participation experience and habit and difficult to do favor to the future participants of public price hearing. Such kind of condition gives rise to the consumers’ state that they have no access to obtain the actual discourse power and thus hinders the development of public participation mechanism of public price hearing.This thesis is designed to study problems in the practice of public participation mechanism of public price hearing in China. It first analyzes the implication of public participation mechanism from the perspective of hearing system and rules for practical operation, then makes an in-depth exploration on the validity, scientification and rationality of public participation mechanism from the theory and the practice based on current situation of the implementation of public price hearing legislation and administrative actions, and finally expounds the influence of public participation mechanism of public price hearing mainly from three aspects, participants of public price hearing, hearing procedure operation specification and the supervision and guarantee of the public’s right of participation. On this basis, the author proposes his views and suggestions on improving the public price hearing system, settling problems in the public participation mechanism of current public price hearing and promoting the perfection of the progress of democratic consultation participating in the decision-making and the public price hearing for public affairs.