East China's Shandong Province, one of the country's economic giants, ratified 1,490 new overseas-funded enterprises in the first 11 months of 1999, with an overallutilization of 3.05 billion US dollars of contractual overseas money.

A transformer enterprise backed by Germany's Siemens company increased its investment to 174 million DM from the originally planned 41 million DM.

Shandong exported 10.26 billion US dollars worth of products during the January-November period last year, a rise of 10.2 percent over the same period of 1998, and 3.4 percentage points higher than the national export growth rate. This means that localexports have begun to rise at a higher pace again, after experiencing setbacks due to the Asia's financial crisis.

During the first 11 months of last year, the province contracted 510 million US dollars of overseas labor services, a 34percent rise on a yearly basis.