BEIJING, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- China's western regions maintained a relatively higher industrial growth rate than eastern regions and the gap was intensifying in 2018, Shanghai Securities News reported on Thursday.
To be specific, 17 provinces of China outperformed the nation's average annual industrial production growth rate of 6.2 percent. The provinces with leading growth rate mainly concentrate in the western regions such as Tibet, Shaanxi and Guizhou, while the growth rate of industrial production in most eastern developed provinces was low. The growth rate in Tianjin and Shanghai was only about 2 percent last year.
Growth rate of industrial production in Beijing and Shanghai showed negative growth in the last two months of 2018. The industrial production growth rate of Beijing was -3.6% and -2.8%, respectively in these two months.
Liu Xuezhi, a senior researcher of Bank of Communications, attributed the increasingly widened gap to the different industrial development stages in China's eastern regions and western regions.
Despite low growth rate of industrial production, Shanghai and Beijing showed a good performance in manufacturing upgrading. In 2018, contributions to industries above a designated scale from Beijing's high-tech manufacturing industry was 66.3 percent, while Shanghai's output value of strategic emerging industries accounted for more than 30 percent of its total industrial output.
(Edited by Bao Nuomin, baonuomin@xinhua.org)
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