(Yicai) Aug. 6 -- Many of China’s provincial-level regions have proposed targeted measures to hit their full-year economic growth goals, with steps to boost consumption a key focus, after most missed their first-half targets due to lackluster tertiary sectors.

At their semiannual economic work conferences, local governments put boosting consumption, creating new consumption growth points, and introducing policies to drive consumption as some of the key directions for new economic support policies.

Only 12 of the 31 provincial-level regions reached or exceeded their first-half growth targets for gross domestic product : the cities of Beijing, Chongqing, Shanghai and Tianjin; the provinces of Fujian, Gansu, Guizhou, Jiangsu, Jilin, Shandong, and Zhejiang; and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

Consumption and the tertiary sectors in most provincial-level regions, including those with relatively positive economic data, expanded more slowly than the local rates of GDP in the first half, becoming a key factor dragging down economic growth.

For example, Jiangsu province's economy expanded 5.8 percent to CNY6.33 trillion (USD887.1 billion) in the six months ended June 30 from a year earlier, compared to a prediction of above 5 percent set at the start of the year. But its tertiary sector grew 4.8 percent retail sales of social consumer goods rose 4.9 percent. In comparison, the secondary sector surged 7.1 percent.

So the Jiangsu provincial government stressed the need to expand consumption and attract investment. For the first objective, the province proposed adapting to and guiding households’ needs, boosting service consumption, increasing the supply of high-quality goods in rural areas, and committing to improving the convenience of logistics services.

Other local governments also advanced similar proposals, including promoting cultural tourism in local policy implementation and driving the development of related industries through tourism.

Yunnan vowed to support tourism as a way to expand and upgrade local consumption while providing policy support to services such as elderly care, childcare, and housekeeping. The southwestern province’s GDP expanded 3.5 percent to CNY1.46 trillion in the first six months of the year from a year ago.

Editor: Tang Shihua, Futura Costaglione