Jiangsu, Guangdong, Beijing most competitive

East China's Jiangsu Province, South China's Guangdong Province and North China's Beijing ranked in the top three for regional economic competitiveness among China's 31 provinces, regions and municipalities in 2013, a paper showed Monday.

Provinces in the country's eastern region scored higher than those in the western region in terms of economic competitiveness in 2013, a blue paper released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) showed.

But compared with the provinces in the central region, those in the western region saw the gap of economic competitiveness narrowing in 2013, it said.

"As China enters a 'new normal' with the pace of economic growth, one of the future growth drivers is actually inter-provincial competition," Li Yang, vice president of CASS, said at the release of the paper.

The result of the findings was based on nine major evaluation indexes including the macroeconomy, industrial economy, sustainable growth and the environment with GDP being one of the basic indexes carrying small weight, the paper said.

Except for Beijing, Guangdong and South China's Hainan Province, the contribution of the secondary industry or manufacturing industry to local economic growth for other provincial-level governments all surpassed 50 percent in 2013, the paper also showed.

It indicates that the secondary industry was still a major contributor to economic growth for most provinces and regions, and there was still a lot of room for most provincial-level governments to raise the contribution of the tertiary industry or services industry to the economic growth, it said.

"It seems that the space for technological development of all industries especially the secondary industry is saturated, but in fact there is still a lot of room for advancing technological progress for industries as well as regional development," Jin Bei, a senior scholar with CASS, said at the release of the paper.

"The focus should be on developing high-end and refined technologies instead of simply focusing on attracting investment and the expansion of industrial capacity," Jin said.

Provincial economies are facing a critical time in upgrading their growth engine in order to achieve sustainable growth under the "new normal" economy, the paper also revealed.

Provincial-level governments need to steadily press ahead with reform, innovation and restructuring to create steady and sustainable growth drivers for the provincial economic development, it suggested.

"One of the new engines for regional economic growth and improving competitiveness comes from optimizing the regional industrial structure and developing services economy as well as technological innovation as there are already successful cases in regions such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong and [eastern coastal] Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces," Wang Jun, a senior economist at the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, a Beijing-based think tank, told the Global Times on Monday.