BEIJING : China’s consumer prices swung into decline and factory-gate deflation persisted in October, as the world’s second-largest economy struggled to emerge from a post-pandemic slump.
The consumer price index (CPI) dropped 0.2 per cent in October from a year earlier, data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed on Thursday, a faster decline than the forecast for a 0.1 per cent fall in a Reuters poll. CPI was unchanged in September.
The producer price index (PPI) fell 2.6 per cent year-on-year against 2.5 per cent drop in September, marking the 13th straight month of decline. Economists had predicted a 2.7 per cent fall in October.
Beijing has been ramping up measures to support the economy, including 1 trillion yuan ($137.43 billion) in sovereign bond issuance and allowing local governments to frontload part of their 2024 bond quotas.
But headwinds remain with a property crisis, local debt risks and policy divergence with the West all complicating the recovery process.
(Reporting Liangping Gao, Ella Cao and Ryan Woo; Editing by Sam Holmes)