|
China's private economy has become the third biggest motor of the country's fast economic growth, behind the state-owned and collective economies, according to statistics released Friday by China's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
Zhu Zhixin, director of the NBS, told a news conference on the second national census of basic work units in China that there were 1.32 million private enterprises in China by the end of 2001, making up 43.7 percent of the country's total number of enterprises.
He also noted that the fast development of the private economy provided not only momentum to China's economic growth, but also a "great relief" to the employment pressure.
According to the NBS statistics, between 1996 and 2001, the number of employees in private enterprises increased by nearly 300percent, and 31.7 million jobs were created. The number of jobs created by the private economy was about 20 percent of the total.
The statistics also showed a strong trend in China's private economy toward the service industries, in which the number of private notarial offices, law firms, accounting offices, and auditing offices had experienced a boom of 115.3 percent.
In contrast, the number of private enterprises in traditional industries like manufacturing dropped 11 percentage points.
A forward leap for China's private enterprises in terms of business scale from 1996 to the end of 2001 was also witnessed, said the NBS.
Up to the end of 2001, the average assets of China's private enterprises had amounted to 1.06 million yuan (133,000 US dollars), 376,000 yuan more than in 1996, and the total annual revenue of China's private enterprises increased by 680 percent.
(Xinhua News Agency January 18, 2003)
|
