Shanghai's municipal government has announced the launch of major reforms aimed at streamlining its administrative branches.

The city government said in a statement released late on Monday that the central government had approved the reform plan, making it the first in the country to get the go-ahead for restructuring.

The statement gave no details on the number of staff affected by the reforms or the timetable.

Under the plan, Shanghai will merge agencies that have similar functions and scrap institutions that are redundant. The goal was to "improve the organizational structure of government agencies", the statement said.

The functions of economic planning and information will come under a single municipal committee, while the personnel and the labor and social security bureaus will become the Human Resources and Social Security Bureau.

The municipal government will be made up of 44 agencies after the reform, the statement said.

The plan reflected the administrative reform at the central government level, including the establishment of "super ministries".

Yu Zhengsheng, secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China, said the core of the reform was to transform the functions of the government.

"We must enhance coordination, stop buckpassing and redundancy, improve efficiency, transparency and public services," he was quoted as saying by the local Liberation Daily Party newspaper on Tuesday.

(Xinhua News Agency October 21, 2008)