A senior World Bank official said Sunday that China is now facing the challenges of changing its economic growth mode, maintaining rapid and sustainable economic growth and managing its growing in equality in order to become the world's top economy by 2030 or 2040.

Addressing the China Development Forum 2005, Shengman Zhang, managing director of the World Bank, said China has to transform its current economic growth mode, which is characterized by low efficiency and excessive consumption of resources and energy, to an efficient one, not simply relying on high growth of investment.

China must also improve its market operating efficiency and improve corporate efficiency, he said.

Zhang said China has to maintain a rapid and sustainable economic growth while controlling the growing the negative impact on its environment through improved efficiency of energy and waterconsumption.

Compared with the energy-efficient industrialized nations, it costs China about 150 percent or 200 percent of energy as those nations to produce per-unit gross domestic product, he said.

The growing inequality in China remains one of the major challenges to the China, which is a by-product of China's evolution, said Zhang.

China needs the help of other members of the international community to address those challenges, said the vice-president.

China has become the world's third largest trading nation in the world and is projected to be the biggest trading nation in 2020, he said.

Source: Xinhua