CPI up 5.5% in May
China's consumer price index (CPI), the main gauge of inflation, rose 5.5 percent year-on-year in May, the highest rate in 34 months, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Tuesday.
CPI rose 5.2 percent year-on-year in the first five months of the year, NBS spokesman Sheng Laiyun said.
Food prices, which account for nearly a third of the basket of goods in the nation's CPI calculation, surged 11.7 percent in May from a year earlier.
The pace of increase accelerated from April's 11.5-percent rise.
Growth in non-food prices also accelerated, rising by 2.9 percent in May from a year earlier, Sheng said.
April's non-food prices increased 2.7 percent year-on-year.
"The steadily rising non-food prices suggest inflation could be sticky and structurally elevated (due to rising labor costs of migrant workers) at about 4 percent in the next several years," Lu said.
Compared with April, food prices slid 0.3 percent in May, of which vegetable prices plunged 9.3 percent month-on-month.
The producer price index (PPI), a main gauge of inflation at the wholesale level, rose 6.8 percent in May from a year ago, unchanged from April's annual growth.
The world's second largest economy "is still facing significant inflationary pressure," which will persist for a while, and the government must attach great importance to the issue, Sheng said.
"Inflation is elevated and will even rise to slightly above 6 percent in June, though the risk for inflation to get out of control is quite small," Lu Ting, an economist with the Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, said in an email note to clients.
PPI up 6.8% in May
China's producer price index (PPI), a major measure of inflation at the wholesale level, rose 6.8 percent in May year-on-year, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Tuesday.
Industrial value-added output up 13.3%
China's industrial value-added output grew 13.3 percent year-on-year in May this year, the National Bureau of Statistics announced on Tuesday.
The year-on-year industrial value-added output growth in May was 0.1 percentage point lower than that in April, according to the NBS.
The May data took the industrial value-added output growth in the first five months of this year to 14 percent, down 0.2 percentage point from the January-April period, NBS spokesman Sheng Laiyun said at a press conference.
On a monthly basis, the industrial value-added output expanded by only 1.03 percent in May from April, Sheng said.
Industrial value-added output measures the final results of industrial production, or in other words the value of gross industrial output minus intermediate inputs, such as raw materials and labor costs.
China's fixed asset investment up 25.8% in first five months
China's fixed asset investment rose to 9.03 trillion yuan ($1.39 trillion) in the first five months, up 25.8 percent from the same period last year, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) announced on Tuesday.
In May, fixed asset investment rose 1.02 percent from April. During the first five months, investment in the nation's property sector rose 34.6 percent year-on-year to reach 1.87 trillion yuan -- of which 1.33 trillion yuan went into residential housing, an increase of 37.8 percent from the same period last year.China's retail sales of consumer goods up 16.9% in May
Consumer spending grew steadily in May with retail sales of consumer goods up 16.9 percent year-on-year, authorities announced Tuesday. The reading was 0.2 percentage points lower than April's, according to figures released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). In May, the country's retail sales totaled 1.47 trillion yuan ($226.77 billion), 1.28 percent higher than in April, said the NBS. Urban retail sales increased 17 percent year-on-year to 1.28 trillion yuan during the same period, faster than the 16.5 percent rise in rural areas which totaled 192.5 billion yuan, it said. From January to May this year, the country's retail sales grew 16.6 percent from the same period last year to 7.13 trillion yuan, up 0.1 percentage points from January to April period, according to the NBS.
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