(3) Tertiary Industry and Its Contribution

Tertiary industry has become the largest industry in Tibet, with newly emerging sectors such as modern commerce, tourism, posts and telecommunications, catering, cultural entertainment and information technology developing rapidly. In 2008, the added value of tertiary industry in Tibet amounted to 21.964 billion yuan. More than half, or 55.5 percent of Tibet's GDP come from tertiary industry, easily making it top of the contributors of local GDP.

Before the peaceful liberation in 1951, Tibet had no roads in the real sense. Local haulage relied mainly on humans and animals. After peaceful liberation, the first large-scale project undertaken by the central government in Tibet was the construction of highways among mountains more than 3,000 m above sea level that linked Lhasa with Sichuan and Qinghai, two neighboring provinces. After that, more investment funds were poured into the region to construct highways linking Tibet with Xinjiang, Yunnan and Nepal. Currently, the Tibet Autonomous Region has 15 main highways and 375 branch roads.

By the end of 2008, almost all counties in Tibet are accessible by roads whose total length reached 51,300 km. Tibet now has a road network of five national highways, 15 main highways and 375 branch roads. Improvement has been made to the road network in rural areas, easing the bottleneck effect caused by poor transportation on the region's rural economic and social development, thus injecting vitality into the economy in urban and rural areas, and promoting balanced development between urban areas and farming and pastoral areas, as shown in Fig. 6.