18,000 New Businesses Open Every Day: China by Numbers

(Bloomberg) -- China's annual work report is littered with some eye popping numbers.

Here's a few highlights that illustrate the enormity of the continent-sized economy and the transformation it's undergoing.

• Gross domestic product grew by 6.6 percent last year to exceed 90 trillion yuan. That represents a 10-fold increase over the past 20 years

• A further 13.61 million new urban jobs were added last year. That's more than the entire population of Belgium
• An average of over 18,000 new businesses opened DAILY last year, taking the total number of market entities past 100 million
• More than 6.2 million housing units were rebuilt in rundown urban areas and 1.9 million dilapidated rural houses were renovated
• Close to 14 million people originally from rural areas gained permanent urban residency
• Another 4,100 kilometers of high-speed railways opened to traffic -- that's about a third the diameter of planet Earth. Over 6,000 kilometers of expressways and more than 300,000 kilometers of rural roads were built or improved -- add those together and you've almost reached the moon
• The number of people in China aged 60 and above has reached 250 million. If China's grey population were a country, it would be the world's fifth biggest by people.

To contact the reporter on this story: Malcolm Scott in Hong Kong at mscott23@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Malcolm Scott at mscott23@bloomberg.net, James Mayger

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