Asian Development Bank Stock Market Press Releases and Company Profile

Beijing, Sep 28, 2006 AEST (ABN Newswire) - The Asian Development Bank (ASX: ADB) and the People's Republic of China (PRC) have worked closely to develop a robust statistical survey method to capture more accurately the contribution of fast expanding domestic services sector in overall economic growth.

The statistical reporting system in the PRC has traditionally focused on the production of goods and has tended to ignore most services. The traditional statistical reporting system fails to capture growth in some of the fast expanding service industries like real estate agents, firms renting construction equipment, business consultants and companies providing communication and software services.

The ADB project helped in developing sample survey methodologies for accurately measuring the size of the services sector. The PRC's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and the Beijing Municipal statistical bureau successfully implemented in 2005 a survey of service enterprises in the Beijing region.

"The NBS plans to extend sample surveys of the main types of services to other provinces so that the growth of the PRC's tertiary sector can be properly tracked between periodic census," said Bishnu Pant, Assistant Chief Economist at ADB.

The past two comprehensive Census of the services or "tertiary" sector showed that the share of services sector in overall gross domestic product (GDP) was greatly underestimated. Using the improved survey methodology, the 1992 value added in services had to be revised upwards by 33 percent and GDP by 9 percent. For the Economic Census of 2004, value added by services was scaled up by 48.7 percent and GDP by 16.8 percent.

Despite the blistering growth rate, the share of the tertiary sector in PRC's GDP is still much smaller than other industrialized G-7 economies. In all of the G-7 economies, the tertiary sector accounts for well over 60 percent of GDP while in the PRC it is still only just over 40 percent. Assuming that the PRC's economy will soon come to resemble those of the developed countries, it is clear that the tertiary sector in the PRC will continue to grow at high rates for several years to come.

This news release is also available in Chinese at:
http://abnnewswire.net/press/cs/29832/adb.html

Contact

Sabyasachi Mitra
T: +63 2 632 4139
M: +63 918 939 9062
E-mail: sabymitra@adb.org


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