BEIJING, China (AFP) — Prices for goods at the factory gate in China rose at a slower pace than expected in April, the government said Wednesday, as commodity prices have fallen.
The producer price index (PPI) rose 6.4 percent year-on-year in April, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), slightly lower than economists’ expectations of a 6.7 percent increase in a Bloomberg News survey.
It slumped following a 7.6 percent gain in March — the first month-on-month decline since last July, NBS statistician Sheng Guoqing said in a statement.
“The sharp rebound in producer prices over the past year has now run out of steam,” Chang Liu, a China economist at Capital Economics Ltd. in London, wrote in a recent report, according to Bloomberg News.
“We expect PPI inflation to ease over the rest of 2017.”
Commodity prices sank to a five-month low last week, according to Bloomberg.
China’s consumer price index (CPI), a main gauge of inflation, rose 1.2 percent year-on-year in April, up from a 0.9 percent gain in March, according to the NBS.
Two national holidays in April had driven up prices for air tickets, hotels, and tours, contributing to this month’s CPI increase, Sheng said.
China’s economy, a vital engine of global growth, expanded 6.7 percent for all of last year, the slowest rate in a quarter of a century. But a slight uptick in the last three months of 2016 provided signs of stabilization.