Information Industry to Surpass 7 Percent of China's GDPIn the next five years, China has planned to make the added value of information industry to amount to 7 percent of GDP, said the State Development Planning Commission (SDPC) Monday.By 2005, the scope and scale of China's information industry and communication network will top the world, according to the Focused Application Plan for National Economy and Social Informationization compiled lately by SDPC. As predicted the social possession of computers across the country will exceed 70 million in the coming five years, while the telephone popularization, the broadcasting and TV coverage will reach 40 and 95 percent respectively. According to the plan, priority will be given to the national economy and social informationization in order to push forward industrial development and exports. In the following five years the national information service industry will witness an average annual growth rate of over 30 percent and Internet users will exceed 8 percent of the total population of the country. Social informationization will bring about great changes to the daily life of the people and informationization in the fields like sci-tech education, medicine and heath, social insurance and public causes will help improve greatly the overall quality of the nationals. In the meantime, informationization will add more than 20 million employment opportunities to the whole society as SDPC estimated. In a move to speed up informationization process, the Chinese government will speed up the reform of investment and finance system, encourage and cultivate domestic risk investment in information industry. At the same time, it will also extend supports to big enterprises to go abroad and strengthen strategic cooperation with overseas partners. China's Information Industry Realized Sustainable, Fast, Sound DevelopmentLu Xinkui, vice minister of Information Industry said at the ongoing" Forum on City Informationization Construction and Management in Western Region" that China's informationization construction has been brought onto a track of sustainable, fast and healthy development. Lu said that the recent 10 years have seen the annual output value of information industry grow by 25 percent, 3 times faster than China's GDP growth. In the year 2000, China's GDP grew by 7.1 percent comprising 1 percent contributed by information industry.By PD Online staff member Li Heng |
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