China's central leadership demanded continued efforts and new achievements incomprehensively deepening reform in 2015, while underscoring the quality of reform.

"Continued efforts are needed to beef up the good momentum of reform," said ChinesePresident and General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee Xi Jinping at Tuesday's eighthmeeting of the central leading group for comprehensively deepening reform.

"Strike the iron while it's hot," said Xi, who leads the group.

Li Keqiang, Liu Yunshan and Zhang Gaoli also attended the meeting, presided over by Xi.

"Speed must follow quality. Detailed implementation plans must be issued as soon as possibleafter crucial reform measures are unveiled to ensure their implementation do not face obstacles,"said a statement released Tuesday after meeting.

Underscoring the need for meticulous research, the statement said the implementation of majorplans must be supervised and problems identified as early as possible.

According to the statement, 80 key tasks identified for 2014 had been "basically finished" inaddition to the completion of 108 missions assigned to various central departments.

"Some of these tasks concerned top-level master reform plans to guide a specific field or reformplans that involve multiple organs and fields. Some had been in the pipeline for years, otherswere trail-blazing pilot programs," it said.

The statement noted that 2015 is a crucial year for comprehensively deepening reform, andcalled for enhancing the sense of responsibility and resolution.

"Morale must be raised, not weakened," it said.

The statement said that reform must be better coordinated, with more emphasis on measures which have symbolic and correlative functions. Efforts should be made on coordination of major tasks across regions or departments.

The whole of society should be mobilized, with authorities identifying their most important tasks as soon as possible and assigning clear deadlines.

Various local governments and departments were praised in the statement for planning, coordination and supervision of progress in 2014 and solving problems "one by one."

"This is the first year for comprehensively deepening reform... and major achievements have already been made in some key fields... which made contributions to maintaining growth, adjusting economic structure, benefiting the people and preventing risks," the statement said.

The meeting approved a summary of progress in comprehensively deepening reform in 2014, set key tasks for the leading group in 2015 and set key tasks for implementing the decision of the fourth plenum of the 18th CPC Central Committee, which is about promoting the rule of law.

Reform set for GDP calculation

China is accelerating statistical reform to launch a new unified system to calculate gross domestic product in the nation's regions.

The move is aimed at preventing inflated local figures contradicting central government calculations, the nation's top statistician said on Thursday.

The central government will have the sole right to evaluate the GDP and growth rates of every province and municipality, said Ma Jiantang, director of the National Bureau of Statistics.

Ma made the comments at the annual National Statistics Work Conference in Beijing.

A draft of the reform has been sent to the State Council, awaiting approval that is expected to be given in the first half of next year.

Economists said that under the new system, total GDP and growth rates may show a different economic trend when compared with expectations under traditional methods.

Experts predict the new system is likely to take effect in 2016 — the first year of the 13th Five-Year Plan.

The current statistical method is based on a direct reporting system from each province and municipality.

Under performance evaluation standards, a high regional GDP is seen by local officials as a route to achieving important career rewards.

Xiang Songzuo, chief economist at the Agricultural Bank of China, said a unified statistical system will help to calculate more accurate economic indicators.

It will also avoid inflated growth figures from local governments, especially when the economy is facing downside risks, Xiang said.

"Previously, total local GDP figures were usually higher than the final national figure, which means the data was unconvincing and did not reflect economic development," he said.

The nation's GDP in the first three quarters of this year totaled 41.99 trillion yuan ($6.82 trillion), according to the National Bureau of Statistics, while the figures from the 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities added up to 47.36 trillion yuan.

Xu Fengxian, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said local governments' enthusiasm for chasing high GDP figures may cool under the new system, and they will pay more attention to growth quality.

Ma said China will adopt the International Monetary Fund's Special Data Dissemination Standard next year to enhance the availability of timely and comprehensive economic and financial data.

This will fulfill a promise to improve the dissemination of statistics made by President Xi Jinping at the Ninth G20 Summit in Brisbane, Australia in November, Ma said.

He suggested that the surveyed unemployment rate be released soon, saying this will be the focus of global attention as it can show real growth quality and the situation in China's job market.

He stressed the importance of this data, saying the nation's top leadership requires a more specific job market indicator before setting the annual GDP growth target and adjusting macroeconomic policies.

Economists predict that as long as unemployment remains low, policymakers may tolerate a slower growth rate of about 7 percent next year, compared with 7.5 percent in 2014.

Ma said the unemployment survey will expand samples and increase statistical content based on the current registered unemployment rate provided by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security.

In 2013, the registered unemployment rate in urban areas reached 4 percent, according to the statistics bureau.

Ma also said that big data and cloud computing will provide new technology support for production of statistics in China.

"We will further use data from the online trading platform to calculate more accurate indicators of retail sales, and regularly report the online retail figures," Ma said.

The bureau will also use online search and web browser technology to improve the statistics in the consumer price index, producer price index and house sales data.

Telecom regulatory and population registration data can also help to clarify the unemployment situation and monitor population movement, Ma said.

China's top economic planner, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC),issued a detailed guideline on public-private partnership (PPP) on Dec 3, the commission'swebsite said.

PPP refers to long-term cooperation between governments and private companies oninfrastructures or public services. In most cases, PPP projects are funded and operated byprivate investors and supervised by local governments.

The guideline offer more clarity to local governments on how to implement the often complicatedfinancing model. The central government has championed this model for one year as Chinagrapples with huge local government debt during created by rapid urbanization.

The guideline recommend different PPP modes to different projects according to its profitability,which range from authorizing franchising, including build-operate-transfer, and build-own-operate,and so on.

It offer a format for a PPP project's general contract, and requires local governments to build aPPP project catalog, and update the progress information on each project to Beijing every monthsince next year.