ИСТИНА

Industrial policy has long been an important tool for adjustment and upgrading of the national industrial structure in China. The case of electric power sector is in many ways a success story. Together with energy policy measures industrial policy has been quite successful in promoting R&D activities and production of high-tech equipment. It gave China an opportunity to increase the share of "clean" energy sources in the power generation mix and allowed it to become the global leader in a number of power industry related areas. As a result China built the largest power system in the world in terms of total installed capacity, electricity generation and consumption, and brought power to 1.4 bln people reaching 100% electrification coverage. Today China has turned into a major supplier of power equipment and a large investor in power projects abroad allowing other developing countries to gain access to electricity and modernize industrial structure. At the same time, the case of the power sector shows deficiencies of this approach. The implementation of industrial policies has led to the over-expenditure of resources and is characterized by problems of horizontal and vertical coordination between the three main players in the policy-making and implementation system: the central government, local authorities, and large state-owned companies.