TAIYUAN - The gross domestic product (GDP) of North China's Shanxi province totaled 960.67 billion yuan ($148.42 billion) in the first half (H1) of 2021, representing a year-on-year increase of 12.2 percent, said a press conference held by the provincial statistics bureau Wednesday.

Despite the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic, the province's average annual GDP growth for the past two years reached 5.2 percent, said the bureau.

In the same period, the added value from the province's primary industries reached 33.04 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 12.5 percent. Meanwhile, the secondary and tertiary industries hit 451.63 billion yuan and 475.99 billion yuan, up by 13.8 percent and 10.9 percent, year-on-year, respectively.

The added value from Shanxi's agriculture, forestry, husbandry, and fisheries reached 35.86 billion yuan in the January-June period, up by 11.9 percent year-on-year. It is 10.1 percentage points higher than the growth rate of the same period in 2020.

In the first six months of this year, the industrial output of the province's major enterprises increased by 15.9 percent year-on-year. The average annual growth over the past two years reached 7.5 percent. It is 0.5 percentage points higher than that of the country.

Among them, equipment manufacturing, emerging industries, and high-tech manufacturing witnessed surging increases of 34.7 percent, 26.3 percent, and 36.5 percent, respectively.

In H1, the per capita disposable income of urban residents in Shanxi hit 17,637 yuan, a year-on-year increase of 9.5 percent, while for rural residents, it was 6,690 yuan, up by 15.4 percent. It was 0.8 percentage points higher than the national average.

A total of 278,000 new urban jobs were created in the province, completing 61.7 percent of the annual target.

By the end of June, the province's registered urban unemployment rate was 3.1 percent, within the target of 4.5 percent.