Shanghai Ranks First in China in Social DevelopmentChina's leading industrial and commercial city Shanghai ranks first in economic and social development among all the provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities on the Chinese mainland, a research has shown.Zhu Qingfang, a researcher from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, found that Shanghai met the modernization standards in terms of ten major indexes in 1998, based on statistics released by the National Bureau of Statistics. The 10 indexes are: per capita gross domestic product (GDP), the share of non-agriculture output in the total GDP, the portion of the services sector output in the total GDP, the ratio of urbanites to the total population, the share of non-agricultural employees in the total employment, the share of university students among people aged between 22 and 24, the net population growth rate, the average life expectancy, the number of doctors and the literacy rate for adults. Zhu found that Shanghai scored the highest in economic and social development in 1998, exceeding Beijing for the first time. The research shows that Shanghai ranked the first on China's mainland in several aspects: The share of non-agriculture population was 73 percent of its total population, the per capita GDP was 28,253 yuan (US$ 3,403), per capita electricity consumption amounted to 262.3 kilowatt hours, and there were more than 5,000 telephones per 10,000 people. In the meantime, consumption and income of its urban and rural residents also ranked first. Shanghai ranked the 27th among the world's 83 leading cities in terms of overall social development in 1998, the researcher found. |
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