Inter-Ministerial Memorandum of Cooperation on Credit Governance: Legal Nature, Effectiveness and Optimization

The memorandum of cooperation is an important way for inter-ministerial credit cooperation governance. Unlike administrative normative documents, it is not only an inter-ministerial agreement in public law, but also a form of contractual governance. The memorandum of cooperation follows the general principle of contract relativity and has the relativity of effectiveness, but this relativity of effectiveness is also relative. Due to the unique power structure and administrative obedience obligation of bureaucracy, imperfect credit legislation and the protection of personal interests, the effectiveness of memorandum of cooperation overflows to the subjects of local public power and their counterparts. The memorandum of cooperation has the advantage of supplementing credit legislation, strengthening administrative assistance and promoting participatory governance, but it also has the defects of impacting the legal system, violating the principle of legal reservation, evading supervision and lacking a cooperation guarantee, so it needs to be optimized in terms of legality, standardization and democracy.