China's service trade mounted to a new high in the first eight months of this year as the government has made more efforts to further bolster and open up the service sector.
The Ministry of Commerce or MOC said Tuesday the country's service trade rose 10.5 percent year on year to stand at 3.44 trillion yuan in the first eight months of this year.
Service exports increased 14.4 percent to 1.13 trillion yuan, while imports gained 8.7 percent to 2.31 trillion yuan, which resulted in a deficit of nearly 1.18 trillion yuan.
The statistics show that China's service exports have continued to maintain growth momentum since the start of this year. The export of telecommunications computer and information services, personal culture and entertainment services, and insurance services grew 61.1%, 38.8% and 26.5 respectively.
The total import and export volume of emerging services exceeded 1 trillion yuan, and the growth rate was faster than the overall growth. From January to August, the total import and export of emerging services was 1,138.39 billion yuan, up 20.9% and 10.4 percentage points higher than the overall growth rate of service import and export, propelling the increase of the proportion of emerging services by nearly 3 percentage points.
At the same time, the proportion of imports of emerging services has gradually increased. Among them, the imports of financial services, intellectual property rights, telecommunications computers and information services grew by more than 20%, accounting for 47.1%, 23.3% and 23.2% respectively.
It was the first time in eight years China has seen a decrease in service trade deficit in the eight-month data.
