Sharing economy sector will grow for decades: expert
Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality took the lead in economic growth among 19 provincial-level regions that had released their GDP figures for the first half of the year as of Monday.
Chongqing's GDP growth rate hit 10.5 percent, followed by Southwest China's Guizhou Province, which reported year-on-year 10.4 percent growth in the first six months.
Beijing, the capital, announced 6.8 percent GDP growth, 0.1 percentage point lower than the national GDP growth rate, in the first half of the year.
North China's Tianjin Municipality, East China's Shanghai Municipality, and North China's Shanxi Province reported 6.9 percent growth. Some 19 out of 31 provinces have reported their GDP growth so far, and 15 of them say they have higher growth than the national average of 6.9 percent.
In the first half of the year, the services sector played a key role in enhancing local economic growth across the country. The added value output of service industries in regions like East China's Shandong Province and Central China's Hubei Province accounted for more than 45 percent of GDP. In places such as Chongqing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Beijing that number exceeded 50 percent, people.com.cn reported Monday.
Experts said that economic development in the provinces is driven by transformation and upgrades of traditional industries.
"Accelerating the transformation and upgrade of traditional sectors like manufacturing to medium- and high-end industries is a prominent element of China's economy," said Niu Li, director of the Macroeconomic Research Office at the State Information Center.
Niu told the Global Times on Monday that rising industries included high tech, equipment manufacturing and some emerging businesses like online shopping, online education and services connected to the sharing economy. They have become novel forces contributing to the country's economic advance.
"In particular, car-sharing and bike-sharing services are gaining huge momentum in China," he said.
Song Qinghui, an independent economist, told the Global Times on Monday that the sharing economy has exerted an imperceptible impact on China's economic structure and become a catalyst for the country's economic transformation and upgrading.
"Given the sluggish economic context and uncertainties in the capital market, it is reasonable that a large amount of capital has flooded into sharing economy industries…but behind the trend remained such phenomena as excess market funds, lack of innovation and industrial bubbles," Song said.
Take the bike-sharing sector for example. The capacity of a city to have parking spaces for shared bikes is limited, and thus some companies will fail if the industry advances beyond the market capacity, according to Song.
Although bubbles exist in the sharing economy, the industry's prospects are quite bright, Song said, noting that there are now more than 100,000 sharing-services firms around the world that profoundly affect people's lives and consumption and the sector's rising momentum would continue to persist in the next 20 years.
