After consumer inflation hit an almost six-year high last month, a senior People’s Bank of China (PBoC) official said that the central bank will closely watch a variety of inflation indicators and work to allay concerns that inflation could rise further, reported Caixin.
“There is no basis for continuous inflation or deflation in China currently,” Sun Guofeng, director of the PBOC’s monetary policy department, said at a press briefing on Tuesday. In September the consumer price index (CPI) rose 3%, up 0.2 percentage points from the month before and the highest reading since October 2013.
The authorities must work to prevent expectations of high inflation from spreading and creating a vicious spiral, he said.
Faster-rising food prices, especially pork, were the major drivers of CPI growth. The average pork price rose 69.3% year-on-year in September, up from 46.7% the previous month and the fastest growth since August 2007. That contributed 1.65 percentage points to CPI growth, official data shows. China’s pork industry has been decimated this year by a deadly epidemic of African swine fever which has spread to every provincial-level region of the country.
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