IN BRIEF (Page 10)

860 billion yuan for Zhejiang

Zhejiang province will allocate 860 billion yuan for 79 large projects to attract more private investment to keep its economy in a good situation, said Zhao Hongzhu, Party secretary of Zhejiang province.

He said small- and medium-sized enterprises in Zhejiang are facing unprecedented challenges amid the global economic downturn because many of them relied on imports and exports. Nine percent of factories there have shut down.

Coal mines closing in Shanxi

Shanxi province will shut down more than a thousand small coal mines by 2010 to optimize the allocation of resources, said the local government.

The Shanxi government said it would close 1,300 coal mines across the province in two years as part of a structural integration process.

Two or three large coal mines with production over 100 million tons will be built by 2010.

Shanghai Nanhui deals

Nanhui District, located in the southeastern region of Shanghai, signed 32 agreements for projects worth approximately $1.6 billion with domestic and foreign companies at Shanghai Nanhui/2008 Lingang New City Investment Environment Conference held in late November.

These projects, 17 out of which were invested by foreign firms, covered an array of industries, including modern equipment manufacturing, medicine and medical apparatus, as well as modern service industry.

The 835-sq-km administrative district reached 45.6 billion yuan GDP in 2007, up 28 percent from the previous year. And a total of 22 companies that established offices in the region were among the global top 500 as of 2007.

Gambling down in Macao

Macao's expenditure-based GDP expanded by 11.3 percent year-on-year in real terms in the third quarter of this year, with its gross gambling revenue growing at a far slower pace than the previous quarters, the city's Statistics and Census Service said last week.

The figures showed that the local gambling industry, the pillar of the special administration region's economy, registered year-on-year growth of 27.6 percent in the third quarter, considerably lower than the 61.8 percent and 47.6 percent increases recorded in the first and the second quarters this year.

In addition, total visitor spending (excluding gambling expenses) rose merely by 4.2 percent, and gross fixed capital formation dropped by 25.2 percent upon shrinking investment in construction and equipment in the period.

Fujian, Taiwan ties closer

Fujian and Taiwan provinces , which face with each other across the Taiwan Strait, have seen closer trade and economic relations this year, the Fujian government said last week.

During the first 10 months, there were 297 projects in Fujian utilizing Taiwan investment which totaled $1.279 billion. That's up 53.82 percent from the same period of last year, the government said.

Taiwan is now Fujian's No 1 import market, the fourth biggest trade partner and 7th biggest export market.

$2.03 billion MOU

Jiangsu province has increased bilateral ties with Singapore by signing 20 memorandums of understanding (MoU) worth roughly $2.03 billion in late November.

Among the 20 agreements signed on the sidelines of the second Singapore-Jiangsu Cooperation Council meeting was a landmark MoU by IE Singapore and the Nanjing government to support a commercially-driven project by a Singapore consortium to develop an eco hi-tech city in Nanjing.

(China Daily 12/08/2008 page10)