BEIJING - The State Council on Wednesday called for more fiscal spending on education and better support to ensure the healthy development of the country's logistics industry.

Local authorities should achieve the required growth in educational expenditures, and growth in educational spending should be significantly higher than that of the regular revenues, according to a statement issued after a State Council meeting presided over by Premier Wen Jiabao.

The government is aiming to increase educational spending to 4 percent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP) by 2012.

In 2010, China's financial expenditure on education accounted for 17.6 percent of the public fiscal revenue.

The State Council urged local governments to further increase educational expenditures from the public financial budget, seek more sources for the expenditures, and spend the educational budget in a more reasonable way.

Also, more supporting policies should be established to boost the logistics industry, as some of the current policies are "restricting" the industry's development, said the statement.

The government should reduce the taxes of logistics enterprises, and provide more support to the industry in land, infrastructure and credit, it said.

More efforts should be made to help logistics vehicles travel smoothly, provide more efficient administrative procedures for logistics companies, and encourage consolidation within the industry, it said.

Local authorities should also push forward technological innovations of the industry, and particularly boost the development of agricultural logistics services, said the statement.

The country announced a support plan for the logistics sector in 2009, which aimed to foster a number of globally competitive logistics companies and realize 10-percent annual industrial growth.