China’s consumer inflation up 2.1% in January

Customers buy groceries at a supermarket in Chongqing, on Dec 2, 2022. (PHOTO / XINHUA

BEIJING – China's consumer price index, a main gauge of inflation, rose 2.1 percent year-on-year in January, while the country's producer price index , which measures the cost of goods at the factory gate, decreased by 0.8 percent year-on-year in the month, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said Friday.

The CPI uptick in January can be partly attributed to the Spring Festival holiday boom and the optimized epidemic response, according to Dong Lijuan, a senior statistician with the NBS.

On a monthly basis, the CPI edged up 0.8 percent. Food prices rose 2.8 percent in January. The growth expanded by 2.3 percentage points month-on-month, and raised monthly consumer inflation by about 0.52 percentage points, according to the data.

Non-food prices rose 1.2 percent from a year earlier. The price growth of gasoline, diesel, and liquified petroleum gas went up by 5.5 percent, 5.9 percent, and 4.9 percent year-on-year, respectively

Specifically, the price of pork, a staple meat in China, slumped 10.8 percent in January from the previous month, as the supply of pork continues to increase, Dong said.

However, pork prices still hiked 11.8 percent year-on-year, narrowing by 10.4 percentage points from the previous month.

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Non-food prices rose 1.2 percent from a year earlier. The price growth of gasoline, diesel, and liquified petroleum gas went up by 5.5 percent, 5.9 percent, and 4.9 percent year-on-year, respectively.

On a monthly basis, the surge in demand for travel and entertainment after the adjustment of the country's COVID-19 response buoyed the prices of plane tickets, movie and show tickets and tours by 20.3 percent, 10.7 percent and 9.3 percent, respectively, according to Dong.

Regarding China's PPI, the decrease in January expanded by 0.1 percentage point from that registered in December. On a monthly basis, China's PPI edged down 0.4 percent in January, according to the bureau.

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"Prices of industrial products continued to fall in January, weighed down by fluctuating international crude oil prices and sliding domestic coal prices," said the NBS statistician.