As the fourth quarter begins, ground is being broken on major projects across China, while work is accelerating on others, heralding the start of a sprint toward achieving the country’s annual economic goals.
East China’s Anhui Province commenced construction on its fourth batch of major projects of the year – a total of 1,089 projects with total investment of 707.5 billion yuan ($97 billion), the Xinhua News Agency reported on Saturday.
In Southwest China’s Sichuan Province, construction has kicked off on about 1,900 major projects with a total investment of 1.08 trillion yuan. Xiong’an New Area in North China’s Hebei Province, the nation’s “city of the future,” announced the start of 58 major projects with an investment of 59.3 billion yuan.
Even during the just-concluded Golden Week holidays, many major projects continued full-throttle construction efforts to maintain their pace.
Railway construction is one of the sectors seeing faster progress with multiple new high-speed rail lines being put into operation recently. According to data from China Railway, the national railway completed fixed-asset investment totaling 432 billion yuan from January to August this year, representing a year-on-year increase of 7.2 percent.
In the first eight months of this year, investment in large projects (those with planned total investment of 100 million yuan or more) grew by 9.9 percent year-on-year, a rate 6.7 percentage points higher than the overall growth of fixed-asset investment, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
The large projects’ contribution to the growth of overall fixed-asset investment increased by 5.4 percentage points compared with the period from January to July. Large project investments have played a significant role in driving growth, Luo Yifei, a statistician with the NBS, explained in a statement.
While fixed-asset investment showed relatively weaker growth in the second quarter, there was a gradual uptick in August and September. It is anticipated that such investment in the fourth quarter will start to gather pace and become the focal point for maintaining stable investment throughout the year, Tian Yun, a Beijing-based economist, told the Global Times on Monday.
Among the projects, those related to logistics, such as specialized rail, road and water transport expansion projects, are likely to be the focus of efforts, Tian said.
Now that the fourth quarter has begun, both consumption and investment are rising, meaning it won’t be a problem to attain China’s annual growth target of around 5 percent. If policy measures remain robust in the fourth quarter, full-year GDP growth might approach 5.5 percent, Tian noted.
(Global Times)
