Shanghai targets 6% GDP growth in 2021

After achieving a 1.7-percent GDP growth in 2020 despite the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak, Shanghai set its GDP target for 2021 at more than 6 percent.

Speaking at the annual session of the Shanghai Municipal People's Congress, the local legislature, Mayor Gong Zheng said although the city's GDP dropped by 6.7 percent in the first quarter of 2020, Shanghai has managed to speed up the economic recovery quarter by quarter.

Its GDP in the first three quarters of 2020 declined 0.3 percent compared with the same period in 2019, showed data from the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Statistics released last October.

Gong said Shanghai aims to achieve a GDP growth of more than 6 percent this year, with consumer prices surging by about 2.5 percent.

In 2020, Shanghai's CPI edged up 1.7 percent year-on-year. With 570,000 new jobs created in the city, the surveyed urban unemployment rate remained within 4.4 percent.

Shanghai's GDP rose from 2.69 trillion yuan (about $415 billion) in 2015 to 3.87 trillion yuan in 2020, with per capita GDP exceeding $23,000.

In the past year, Shanghai witnessed new momentum from emerging industries and the digital economy. The operating income of the software and information technology service industries increased by more than 12 percent.