The State Department approved the establishment of Lanzhou New Area as the 5th State-level new area, the Shanghai Security news reported on Monday.

Lanzhou New Area is the first State-level new area in the Northwest of China and will become one of the most important areas in the region.

The approval of the Lanzhou New Area will allow the implementation of new strategies to develop the western regions, and also new proposals to accelerate the execution of the western region development strategy, Niu Zhengchao, director of the Institute of Economics at the Lanzhou Academy of Social Sciences said.

The administrative area of Lanzhou New Area is 806 square kilometers. The area plans to achieve 50 billion yuan ($7.88 billion) of GDP by 2015 and 270 billion yuan by 2030.

The other State-level new areas are: the Pudong New Area of Shanghai, the Binhai New Area of Tianjin, the Liangjiang New Area of Chongqing and the Zhoushan Island New Area of Zhejiang.