Pudong Reports Faster Growth in 1st QuarterShanghai's Pudong New District reported a gross domestic product (GDP) of 21.458 billion yuan in the first three months of this year, a rise of 15.6 percent over the same period of last year.According to the latest official statistics, Shanghai's GDP in the first quarter of this year rose by 9.8 percent over the corresponding period of 2000, indicating that the increase rate of Pudong exceeded that of Shanghai as a whole. Pudong, China's reform pioneer since the early 1990s, has set three goals for the coming five years, aiming to top a GDP value of 200 billion yuan, gain a total of 10 billion U.S. dollars in exports and increase the proportion of the service industry to over 50 percent of its GDP. By the end of March this year, Pudong had achieved an industrial output value of 41.902 billion yuan, up 22.8 percent over the same period last year, among which the information industry has taken the lead with an increase rate of 110 percent, which helped increase the total industrial output by 15.5 percent. In the first two months of this year, Pudong's exports totaled 1.56 billion U.S. dollars-worth, an increase of 37.2 percent year- on-year, which accounted for 39.6 percent of that of the whole city. In the meantime, overseas investment and foreign-funded contracts surged by 78 percent and 150 percent, respectively. By the end of March, a total of 48 foreign banks and 110 domestic and overseas financial agencies had opened offices in Pudong. |
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