Research On Generation Mechanism Of Public Utilities Price Hearing Representatives

In the1990s，Our country is going through a transition from planned economy to market economy andthe government gives quite a number of commodities pricing power to the local or let the price just bedetermined by the market itself. Because the utility is characterized by the necessity of the people’slivelihood, exclusiveness, externality, monopoly and territoriality, the government must hold its pricecontrols. Before using the price hearings, when determining utility prices, the local government often goesthrough one-to-one negotiations with the enterprise. It excludes buyer utility products or servicespurchasers, contrary to the trend of democratic decision-making. From the1980s, at the frontiers of China’sreform and opening up, some places have tried to introduce in the government price decision advisorycommittee system, which is similar to the price hearing system, in order to know more about the opinionsof the stakeholders. Given the important role the price hearing in foreign government price control playsand the experience in southern areas, in order to expand democratic participation and make thegovernment’s price decision-making more scientific and reasonable, the Chinese government introduced theprice hearing into the government’s price decision-making in the price law promulgated in1998. Then ourcountry put through series of laws and regulations to establish the position of the price hearing system ingovernment price decision-makings to make it more perfect.When the government formulates the utility prices, the hearing can restrict utilities, provide guaranteesfor democratic participation in price-makings and increase the role of social identity in price-makings. Inorder to maximize the effect, we must ensure the publicity, equality, justice and efficiency of the hearingand make the hearing on behalf of the selection as an important link in price-hearing procedure. Inimplementing this section, the government price departments are sure to adhere to the principles oflegitimacy, equality, justice and publicity, in order to ensure the universality and rationality ofrepresentatives. In practice, there are many problems when the government price departments selecting theprice hearing representatives，such as the unfairness of the government price department, the weakness ofrepresentatives’ representativeness, the public lack of the enthusiasm for the candidates. The causes of theseproblems are various: the indeterminacy of the representatives, the unspecific selection standard, the unreasonably selection method, the disclosed relevant information, the rent-seeking behavior of thegovernment, the imperfection of relief mechanism and so on. For the several reasons, we can take thesemeasures to improve the generation mechanism of price hearing representatives, such as regulatingreasonable amount of representatives, setting reasonable selection criteria, improving the method ofchoosing representatives, selecting in transparent process, strengthening the supervision of governmentprice departments, perfecting the remedy mechanism of price hearing representatives, etc.Price hearing in our country is still at its initial stage, it is true that there will be many problems. Thegeneration mechanism of price hearing representatives is only one aspect of price hearing, so we can notdeny it because of the present problems but have reasons to believe that with the reform and deepen of thedevelopment of China’s public administration, price hearing system will be more perfect in the future.