Shanghai's painstaking efforts to fight smuggling paid off during the past decade when the east China metropolis maintained a continuous two-digit annual economic growth, said Mayor Han Zheng at a government conference on Monday.

However, municipal authorities must still keep alert since smuggling is still an extremely lucrative business for criminals and more complicated tricks and technologies are being used nowadays, warned the mayor.

From 1998 to June of this year, the local customs and police departments have investigated 2,572 smuggling cases worth 3.7 billion yuan (US$450 million), according to official statistics.

The authorities have decided to launch a new anti-smuggling campaign in an effort to further clear the investment environment and export-import order.

The hard fight successfully avoided a loss of custom duties. The tax volume reported by customs rose sharply from 18.86 billion yuan (US$2.3 billion) in 1998 to 58.2 billion yuan (US$7.1 billion) in 2002. It hit 38.7 billion yuan (US$4.7 billion) during the first half of this year.

(Xinhua News Agency September 2, 2003)