A - Comparative - Study - on - Industrial - Structure - Between - China - and - the - UK

A Comparative Study on Industrial Structure Between China and the UK

National economies can be broken down into three main areas:“primary” industries, such as agriculture, mining and fishing; “secondary” industries, maunfacturing complex goods from those primary products; and tertiary industries, known as bankng, telecommunications, tourism, insurance, ect1. Either China or the UK is a leading global trading nation. China is the world’s second largest economy by nominal GDP and by purchasing power parity after the United States, while the UK is today the sixth-largest economy in the world and the third-largest in Europe after Germany and France, having fallen behind France. Both countries’ GDP is high all over the world.

There are some similiraties and differences on industrial structure between China and the UK.

The common characters lie in the following points. Firstly, either China or the UK’s agricultural sector is samll but efficient. According to the United Nations World Food Program, though China’s agriculture contributes only 13% of its GDP, China fed 20 percent of the world's population with only 7 percent of the world's arable land ,while Britain’s agriculture contributes 1.4% of the national wealth , it produces 58% of the UK’s food needs with only 2% of its workforce.

Secondly, energy production is an important part of both countries’

Reference:1 The book The Society and Culture of Major English-Speaking Countries an Introduction

economies. Britain is rich in oil, gas, coal, ect, and this abundance of energy resources means that the UK has become an overall exporter of energy. With the extraction of North Sea oil and gas that started in the 1970s, until the 2000s the UK was self sufficient in energy, and the UK was a netexporter of oil and gas in recent decades. Since 1980, China's energy production has grown dramatically. For example, the mining sector accounted for less than 0.9% of total employment in 2002 but produced about 5.3% of total industrial production. Coal makes up the bulk of China's energy consumption, and China is the largest producer and consumer of coal in the world. As China's economy continues to grow, China's coal demand is projected to rise significantly.

Thirdly, either China or the UK has a relative shrinking on the importance of secondary industry and a spectacular growth in teriary or service industries. China's services output in 2010 ranks third worldwide (after US and Japan), and high power and telecom density has ensured that it has remained on a high-growth trajectory in the long-term. In 2010 the services sector produced 43% of China's annual GDP. In Bratian, 7o% of the UK’s workforce are employed in the service sector, which now produces 65% of national wealth2.

The differences include the followings. Firstly, based on nominal GDP and GDP (PPP) estimates and sector composition ratios provided by

2

According to Wikipedia about Economy of China and the UK

the CIA World Fact Book at market or government official exchange rates with figures in trillions of United States dollars in 2012，China’s primary industries account for 10.1% of its nominal GDP, secondary industries produce 45.3% of its nominal GDP, and tertiary industries provide 44.6% of its nominal GDP. As for the UK, the contribution of these three major industries on its national wealth is 0.7%, 21.1% and 78.2%.3 By contrast, it can been obviously notice that secondary industries play an extremely important role in China’s nominal GDP, while tertiary industries are the most significant part in Britain’s economy, which is more advanced than China.

Secondly, China’s major secondary industries include mining and ore processing, iron and steel, machinery, petroleum, cement, chemical, automobiles and other transportation equipment including rail cars and locomotives, ships, and aircraft,ect; British companies are active in all major fields of manucturing industry, but are particular strong in pharmaceuticals, chemicals, aerospace, food and drink4. Evidently, Britain is a technology-intensive economy, while China is a labor-intensive and energy-intensive ecnomy.

Thirdly, compared with tertiary industries producing 44.6% of nominal GDP in China and 78.2% in Britain, apparently, in China, its proportion of GDP is still lower than a majority of developed countries.

34

According to List of countrise by GDPsector compostion.

According to the book The Society and Culture of English-Speaking Countries An Introduction

Comparatively speaking, on one hand, though China has made great progress in improving its industrial structure, it still has a tough way to go. It is widely acknowledged that in China, secondary industries’s development, which takes the biggest proportion of GDP, is at the cost of energy consumption and the deterioration in the environment, such as air and water pollution, soil erosion. If China doesn’t impove its industrial structure, reducing the protortion of secondary industries and increasing the protortion of tertiary industries, it will continue to lose arable land because of erosion and infrastructure development. But at the same time, it must be ensured that the reform mustn’t cause some social problems, such as unemployment. On the other hand, China must develop high and new technology industries to provide breakthroughs in stimulating economic growth and to turn a labor-intensive and energy-intensive nation into a technology-intensive one.

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