The brightest spot in the region - Sichuan won the first 5 trillion YUAN of GDP in the western region, with a target growth of 6.5% this year

The total economic output of Sichuan, the largest economic province in the western region, stepped onto a new level last year, and the regional gross domestic product (GDP) exceeded 5 trillion yuan.

On January 19, the Sichuan Provincial Bureau of Statistics released that according to the results of the unified accounting of regional GDP, the GDP of Sichuan Province in 2021 will be 5,385.079 billion yuan, an increase of 8.2% over the previous year at comparable prices, and an average growth of 6.0% in two years.

Zeng Junlin, spokesman for the Sichuan Provincial Bureau of Statistics, said that this is the first province in the western region to exceed 5 trillion yuan, and Sichuan Province's GDP in 2021 will account for about 4.7% of the country,000, and its position as a major economic province and the leader in the development of the western region is more prominent. Together with Chongqing Municipality, the total economic volume of the Chengdu-Chongqing Twin Cities Economic Circle last year is expected to exceed 7 trillion yuan.

Sichuan's GDP exceeded the trillion yuan for the first time in 2007, and since then it has crossed the thresholds of 2 trillion, 3 trillion and 4 trillion yuan in 2012, 2015 and 2018 respectively. At the same time as the total number of provinces broke through, Sichuan also rose from 9th in 2007 to 6th in 2020 in the national provincial rankings.

According to the goals of Sichuan's "14th Five-Year Plan", during the "14th Five-Year Plan" period, Sichuan's total economic output will step up to two trillion yuan, with an average annual growth rate of 6%. In 2021, the GDP will exceed 5 trillion yuan, and Sichuan will achieve the first total breakthrough in the opening year of the "14th Five-Year Plan".

Zeng Junlin said that one of the characteristics of Sichuan's economic operation in 2021 is "total breakthrough" and "speed catch-up". Sichuan, which has long maintained higher than the national economic growth rate, has been at a quarterly growth rate below the national growth level since last year, and Sichuan has been catching up with the national growth rate throughout the year.

In the first quarter of last year, the national GDP grew by 18.3% and Sichuan by 15.8%, a difference of 2.5 percentage points. In the first half of last year, the whole country grew by 12.7% and Sichuan by 12.1%, a difference of 0.6 percentage points. The gap between the first three quarters and the national growth rate narrowed to 0.5 percentage points. In the end, the annual growth rate was 0.1 percentage points higher than that of the whole country.

For the economic trend in 2022, Zeng Junlin also admitted that he is facing downward pressure. He said that the external environment is becoming more complex and severe and uncertain, and the triple pressure of demand contraction, supply shock and expected weakening facing the national economic development has both common and characteristic reflections in Sichuan.

Zeng Junlin said that the recovery of demand was less than expected, and the recovery of domestic demand, especially consumer demand, was obviously insufficient. Affected by the epidemic and other factors, the total retail sales of social consumer goods increased by an average of 6.4% in two years, 4 percentage points lower than the growth rate in 2019. Compared with the basic return of investment and imports and exports to the level of normalization, consumer demand is significantly weaker.

Insufficient demand has also affected the recovery of supply. And the basis for production recovery is not very stable, PPI and CPI scissors difference, affected by raw material prices, middle and downstream enterprises industrial production prices are high in and low out. There are also some industries where the supply of the industrial chain is unstable, the supply cycle is prolonged, and the monthly fluctuations in industrial added value are relatively large.

However, Zeng Junlin said that there are also some positive factors in the economic operation in 2022, such as base interference, imbalance in the recovery of supply and demand, and the impact of the epidemic may weaken, the economy will gradually return to normal growth, and the economic growth rate will be closer to the potential growth rate of the economy.

At the fifth session of the 13th People's Congress of Sichuan Province, which opened on January 18, Huang Qiang, governor of Sichuan Province, made a government work report, which put forward the main expected goals for The economic and social development of Sichuan Province this year, of which GDP growth in 2022 is about 6.5%.