China’s new economy grows twice as fast as GDP and helps offset job losses, says top think tank
Technology-driven sectors are tipped to create a million jobs a year, providing a buffer to lay-offs in traditional fields like steelmaking
China’s new economy – internet-based business ranging from e-commerce to car-hailing services – grew twice as quickly as overall gross domestic product in the 10 years to 2016, according to the country’s top think tank.
And the number of new jobs created by technology-based industries increased at a rate that outpaced job creation in the economy as a whole by more than 20 times during the same decade, the study found.
The new economy expanded at an average annual rate of 16.1 per cent in the 10-year period starting in 2007, 1.9 times faster than overall GDP growth, according to research by the Institute of Population and Labour Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) found.
The number of vacancies in the new economy increased by 7.2 per cent annually in the same period, 22 times the rate of job creation in the country as a whole, giving it “great potential to offset the lay-off pressure brought by overcapacity cuts”, the report’s authors said in a media release on Tuesday.
The world’s second-largest economy has been struggling to transform itself from a pollution-heavy, investment-led model to one based on consumption and technology in a bid to achieve “high-quality” growth, a target introduced by the party’s new leadership in October.
