Economic overview

( chinadaily.com.cn)

Agriculture

Pingyao county is one of the modern agriculture demonstration counties in Shanxi province. It has an annual frost-free period of 160 days, an annual average precipitation of 450mm and an annual mean temperature of 10.2 C (50.36 F). Hence, it serves as an important production base for agricultural products.

Pingyao county has maintained significant growth in sectors of greenhouse vegetables, scaled farming, dried fruit and fresh fruit production as well as agricultural byproducts processing. Two national leading enterprises, Pingyao Beef Group and Pingyao Longhai Industrial are listed as Shanxi's key projects.

Industries

The six pillar industries of Pingyao county include the coke, foundry, machinery manufacturing, reclaimed rubber, food processing and textiles.

After mergers and acquisitions, seven coal mines are left with reserve capacity totaling 6 million tons per year. The coal economy accounts for more than 50 percent of the industrial economy. With the rapid development of the coal washing and coking industry, Pingyao has become the third largest county in these industries along with Jiexiu and Lingshi counties in Jinzhong city.

There are 137 casting enterprises in Pingyao, offering an annual production capacity of nearly 1 million tons and an output of 700,000 tons. A total of 350,000 tons of their production capability lies in motor housing, consisting of 60 percent of the national market share.

Tourism

Being a national historical and cultural city as well as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Pingyao Ancient City plays a leading role on Shanxi’s tourism, receiving 1.3 million visitors in 2011, a year-on-year increase of 12.7 percent. Its total ticket revenue reached 145 million yuan ($23.45 million) in 2011, an increase of 45 million yuan. The overall output value of the tourism-led tertiary industry, in the same year, was 3.77 billion yuan, representing 46 percent of its GDP.

In recent years, based on its own advantages, Pingyao county has made a great effort in “Four Developments”, namely, transforming development, leaping development, overall development, and safe and stable development.

It has strived for “Four Distinguishing Features”, namely, features on agriculture, tourism, culture and trade. Meanwhile, it has greatly encouraged construction as a tourist center city of Shanxi merchant culture, thus obtaining a momentum of relatively rapid economic growth.

Recent Economic Performance

In 2011, Pingyao’s GDP reached 8.4 billion yuan, an increase of 15.1 percent over the previous year.

Financial revenues reached 1.1 billion yuan, an increase of 21.6 percent or 195 million yuan. Specifically, the general budget revenue was 423 million yuan, rising by 20.14 percent.

The added value of industries above a designated scale was 2.89 billion yuan, an increase of 15.4 percent year-on-year.

Fixed assets investment accounted for 4.2 billion yuan, an increase of 32.3 percent.

Social retail goods revenue was 3.4 billion yuan, rising by 18 percent.

The per capita disposable income of urban residents rose by 15.45 percent, reaching 18,016 yuan. The per capita net income of rural residents grew by 23.2 percent, reaching 6,918 yuan. These figures demonstrate that Pingyao county achieved or even over-fulfilled all its targets.