China's trade with countries along B&R up 17.8 pct y-o-y in 2017

BEIJING, Mar. 2 (Xinhua) -- China's trade with the counties along the Belt and Road rose 17.8 percent year on year to about 7.4 trillion yuan, according to the data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Wednesday.

To be specific, China's exports to those countries stood at about 4.3 trillion yuan in 2017, up 12.1 percent year on year, while its imports from those countries increased 26.8 percent year on year to about 3.1 trillion yuan, said the NBS.

Regarding China's non-financial foreign direct investment (FDI), the countries along the Belt and Road set up 3,857 new enterprises in China last year, up 32.8 percent. Their direct investment in China amounted to 37.4 billion yuan (about 5.6 billion U.S. dollars).

The NBS said that China's non-financial outbound direct investment (ODI) amounted to 120.1 billion U.S. dollars in 2017, down 29.4 percent year on year. To be specific, its ODI in the countries along the Belt and Road stood at 14.4 billion U.S. dollars.

In the full year of 2017, turnover of the country's foreign contracted projects amounted to 168.6 billion U.S. dollars, up 5.8 percent year on year. To be specific, turnover of the contracted projects in the countries along the Belt and Road reached 85.5 billion U.S. dollars, up 12.6 percent year on year, accounting for 50.7 percent of the total turnover of foreign contracted projects, said the NBS.