Qingdao, Shandong province [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

The eastern coastal city of Qingdao in Shandong province has put improving the business environment as one of its top priorities to increase urban competitiveness and boost regional high-quality development.

This year, the city continues to uphold the highest and best standards, fully implement all measures to improve the business environment, and make it a new driving force for high-quality economic development, a new symbol of opening-up, and a new advantage for regional competition, according to local authorities.

Greater efforts have been made to attract and utilize foreign capital, widen market access, promote further opening-up of modern service industries and grant foreign-funded enterprises national treatment.

The city plans to further adhere to the standard economic and trade rules, create a more market-oriented and law-based business environment, and open up even wider to multinational corporations this year, local officials said.

In recent years, a series of the city's new measures to optimize the business environment have been widely recognized and praised, such as "implementing local legislation for the business environment", "setting up Qingdao Entrepreneur Day", and "promoting digital and intelligent government services for the benefit of the people and enterprises".

Qingdao has been ranked among the top 10 cities in China for the second year, according to the main survey results released by the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, which are based on the business environments of 10,000 private enterprises in 2022.

Thanks to the continuous optimization of the business environment, the vitality of market entities has ignited in Qingdao, and the number of registered entities continues to increase year after year. The total number of actual market entities in the city has reached more than 2.05 million.