City’s growth slows as quality rises
Print Edition
SHANGHAI’S gross domestic product expanded 7 percent last year, below both 2013’s 7.7 percent and the national average of 7.4 percent, the city’s statistics bureau said yesterday.
Economic output amounted to 2.35 trillion yuan (US$384 billion) in 2014, with the service sector producing 64.8 percent of the total.
Although missing the government’s target of 7.5 percent, Shanghai has realized an expansion of better quality and more sustainability, said Tang Huihao, the bureau’s chief economist.
“Shanghai has kept its economic growth stable over the past year,” Tang said. “It is achieved against the background of accelerating reforms and deepening economic restructuring.”
The city set aside a record 83.1 billion yuan last year for research and development in a bid to increase the added value of its economy and boost its sustainability, Tang said. The investment equaled 3.6 percent of the city’s GDP, and had increased by more than 14 percent a year since 2010.
“Shanghai has made itself on a par with cities in developed countries concerning R&D input ... the rising investment is initiated mostly by companies, which play a leading role in innovation,” Tang said.
Partly as a result, strategic manufacturing industries, such as information technology and biomedicine, grew 5.5 percent last year, he said, 3.9 percentage points faster than the overall growth of industrial production. Strategic service industries, such as finance and logistics, grew 7.9 percent.
Overall, the city’s economy was led by the expansion in the service sector, which rose 8.8 percent year on year to 1.53 trillion yuan in 2014, while manufacturing gained 4.3 percent to 816.5 billion yuan, and agriculture edged up 0.1 percent to 12.4 billion yuan.
Growth was steady throughout 2014 with the pace moving within 7 percent and 7.1 percent in each quarter.
Shanghai is to accelerate the construction of the pilot free trade zone this year to deepen reforms and sustain its economic growth, Party Secretary Han Zheng said last month.
Adjusting to new normal
The move is part of efforts to adjust the city to the state of new normal, which means slower economic growth but accelerating industrial restructuring process and changing gears of the city’s development, Han said.
Shanghai’s retail sales grew 8.7 percent to 871 billion yuan last year, slightly more than 2013’s 8.6 percent.
Foreign direct investment added 8.3 percent to US$18.2 billion in 2014, compared with a rise of 10.5 percent in 2013. Trade gained 4.6 percent to 2.9 trillion yuan, stronger than national growth for the first time since 2010 thanks to the pilot free trade zone, the bureau said.
The Consumer Price Index, the main gauge of inflation, increased 2.7 percent last year, well under government’s target limit of 3.5 percent, making people’s disposable income more valuable, the bureau said. Shanghai urban residents earned an average 47,710 yuan last year, up 8.8 percent on an annual basis.
The bureau also said the city’s fiscal income added 11.6 percent to 458 billion yuan last year, 1.8 percentage points faster than the pace in 2013.
With 0.06 percent of China’s land, 1.8 percent of its population and 1.7 percent of its investment, Shanghai produced more than 4 percent of the nation’s overall economic output, the statistics bureau figures revealed.
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