On the 9th of this month, the National Development and Reform Commission announced the "Guidance on the implementation of ladder electricity prices for residential electricity use (Draft for Soliciting Opinions)". It intends to change the current single-resident electricity pricing mechanism to sub-pricing based on consumer electricity consumption. The price increases step by step with the increase of electricity consumption, which is the “ladder price”. Survey shows that 60% of residents support the implementation of "ladder prices."

This means that the reform of the public resource utilization system represented by the “electricity price reform” is about to start.

There are two "rigid" public resources

Public resources refer to the collection of scarce elements that have a specific use value and value to the public in the production or living areas. The water, electricity, coal, gas, oil, and even highways that the public is familiar with belong to the category of public resources. Their basic characteristics are publicity, usefulness, and scarcity. The contradiction between public and scarcity is public resources. Salient features.

Publicity reflects the public resource demand and the popular nature of public use, that is, it is closely related to the people's livelihood of the public. The public is indispensable to it, and it is a rigid demand. Scarcity reflects the limited use of public resources, that is, the carrying capacity of resources. Or the reproducible ability is closely related, and the amount of use of the public by the public is limited to different degrees, which is a rigid restriction.

These two "rigidities" make it a difficult problem to deal with the relationship between public resources, people's livelihood, people's livelihood, and people's environmental carrying capacity. When the government expands the publicity of the use of public resources and benefits the people's livelihood, it will lead to limited use of resources; and by controlling the scale of the public nature of resources, the shortage of limited resources will reduce the public's use of public resources.

Taking the power supply as an example, the government has promoted "home appliances to the countryside" and "replacement of old people" to benefit the people's livelihood. This will inevitably lead to a rise in electricity consumption. If the government simply limits the scale of electricity consumption for the people, it may reduce the quality of life of the people; if it does not control the mode and scale of electricity consumption by the public, it may cause strain on electricity use and it cannot achieve the goal of energy conservation and emission reduction. These contradictory tensions call for efficient institutional arrangements, taking into account the relationship between the people's livelihood, the environment, resources, and the economy.

Differential payment is a mature experience in foreign countries When developed countries in foreign countries resolve the above-mentioned contradictions, they adopt the “differentiated resource utilization payment system”, which is commonly used by the public as “multiple use and more payment”. Its specific approach is basically the same as the "guidance opinion", that is, the interval of resource utilization, the differentiation of the level of price burden, and the increase in the use of more resources to pay more and pay high prices.

Many countries in the United States, Japan, South Korea, and Europe have already implemented this resource utilisation system and are fully used in the areas of public resources such as electricity prices, water prices, fuel taxes, and road occupancy fees. It can be said that the "differentiated resource utilization payment system" has become the basic practice and world standard for the construction of legal systems for public resources in major developing countries in the world and in some developing countries.

At present, China has enacted the Environmental Protection Law, a basic law in the field of environmental protection, and established the "polluter responsibility principle," but the development of the legal system for resources and energy still lags behind and lacks a unified basic law on resources and energy.

The Energy Conservation Law that has already been enacted and implemented in China, although it involves the construction of systems for energy use, it still lacks a unified system of principles for the use of resources and energy, and it has not really established "resource use" similar to the "polluter pays system" in environmental law. "payer system" establishes an institutional system in which public resource users "use more and pay more, and do not use non-payment." Even if the "Guidance Opinion" is promulgated and implemented, it is only an act of administrative guidance. It has not yet risen to the legal level and the level of institutional construction.

However, the implementation of the “guidance” is a bold attempt by China to implement the differentiated payment system for public resources. It made the public realize that in the era of “energy saving, emission reduction and environmental protection”, the era of “low consumption” or even “free” occupying public resources is coming to an end, and the era of “multiple use and more payment” of differentiated resources is approaching.

How can more use of multi-pay help social equity to establish the "differentiated resource utilization payment system"?

First, it contributes to the equitable distribution of resource utilization. When a public resource operates at a single low price, it is actually a disguised subsidy to resource users, and the amount of subsidy is proportional to the amount of resources used. If there are many resource occupiers, the subsidy they enjoy is also large, resulting in resource occupant resources. Use unfair burdens.

"Differentiated resource utilization payment" establishes a relatively fair "level fairness" and "vertical fairness" system, so that the public holding the same amount of resources can achieve the same level of burden, so that the public with different amounts of resources can apply different levels of burden. The occupiers pay more, less occupiers pay less, and ultimately realize the burden of the entire society as a whole.

Second, encourage conservation of resources and low-carbon environmental protection. The “differentiated resource utilization payment system” adopts an interval-based and step-by-step differential payment method. It adopts a method of increasing marginal costs to increase the cost of resource allocation for the areas with different resource levels, and thus forms a mechanism to encourage high-burden areas. In order to save resources, the public group provides a strong incentive for economic incentives to achieve the goal of energy conservation and emission reduction for resource utilization.

Third, balance the economy and protect people's livelihood. In the differentiated resource utilization payment system, under the condition that the resource utilization price in the lowest burden region is close to the true price of the resource, the high-loading region will produce a value overflow effect, that is, the excess portion of the resource utilization fee will be generated, and this excess portion It can be used for public projects, or subsidize the use of public resources in the low-burden section to meet the shortcomings of “negative market externalities” and achieve the social goals of helping the poor.

Therefore, under the premise of reasonably determining the amount of normal residents’ use of resources and not substantially increasing the burden, the government should rationally widen the gap in resource payment intervals and gradually establish a “differentiated resource utilization payment system” under the public resource utilization system to protect people’s livelihood. On the basis of fair burdens, energy conservation and emission reduction, and balancing of the economy, we will achieve the balanced coordination of multiple goals of “people's livelihood, environment, resources, and economy”.