Per capita GDP in six municipalities, provinces and regions including Beijing, Zhejiang and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region surpassed $10,000 in 2012, putting them at a level close to a developed economy, according to statistics released by the local governments as of Tuesday.
For the first time, per capita GDP in East China's Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces as well as North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region surpassed $10,000 in 2012, while the per capita GDP in three municipalities - Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai - stayed above $10,000 last year.
According to the World Bank's standards in 2011, a region with a per capita gross national income (GNI) greater than $12,476 can be considered a high-income economy. In China, the gap between the values of GNI and GDP is usually within 2 percent.
"The six areas' per capita GDP data has already reached or is close to the threshold of a high-income economy, but compared with the US and some countries in Europe which have a per capita GDP between $30,000 and $50,000, they still lag far behind," Tang Jianwei, a senior macroeconomic analyst at the Bank of Communications, told the Global Times Tuesday.
While Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces are traditional manufacturing bases, the emergence of Inner Mongolia is largely attributed to the region's abundant natural resources, experts said.
"Inner Mongolia has mainly benefited from rising prices for resources such as coal in recent years," Tian Yun, deputy head of the China Society of Macroeconomics under the National Development and Reform Commission, told the Global Times Tuesday.
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