SHANGHAI’S economy raced to a better-than-expected start this year, with gross domestic product growing 6.8 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, Shanghai Statistics Bureau said yesterday.

The expansion put the value of the city’s GDP at 692.28 billion yuan (US$101 billion) in the first three months, the statistics bureau said.

The growth was 0.1 percentage points faster than the same period of last year but it slower than the national level by the same margin.