China's gross domestic product (GDP) for the year 2001 is expected to top nine trillion yuan (US$1.08 trillion), a year-on-year increase of 7.3 percent.

The growth rate is much higher than the world's estimated average of 1.3 percent, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said Monday.

According to figures released by the NBS, the country's GDP exceeded one trillion yuan in 1986 and since 1993 has been increasing by nearly one trillion yuan a year.

The 1978-2000 period has seen the fastest development in China, with an average annual GDP growth rate of 9.5 percent, compared with 2.5 percent for developed countries and five per cent for developing countries.

Industrial Efficiency Improves in First 10 Months

China's industrial enterprises as a whole continued to perform well in the first ten months of this year, but the losses of many sectors were also on the rise, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said Monday.

NBS figures show that the composite index of the economic efficiency of industrial enterprises rose to 119.4 in January-October, 3.6 points higher than in the same period of last year.

The index was also 0.2 points higher than in the first nine months of the year. The total sales income of industrial enterprises for the 10 months amounted to 7,379 billion yuan, up 11.8 percent year on year, but the growth rate was 0.5 percentage points lower than that for the January-September period.

The total net profit for the ten months stood at 364.6 billion yuan, up 9.3 percent, with the growth rate falling by 3.3 percentage points from that for the January-September period.

In the ten months, the total losses of industrial enterprises in the red rose by 7.6 percent on a yearly basis, and the growth rate was 3.5 percentage points higher than that in the January-September period. But the NBS did not give concrete figures of the losses.

(Xinhua News Agency November 26, 2001)