China’s consumer inflation accelerated for the first time since August, in what’s likely a blip caused by a burst of household spending around the Lunar New Year holiday even as deflationary pressures persist.
The consumer price index rose 0.5 percent in January from a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics said Sunday, compared with a 0.1percent gain in the previous month. The median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg was a 0.4 percent increase.
A temporary spending boom during the eight-day break is briefly obscuring the extent of the deflationary challenge facing the world’s second-biggest economy.
China’s factory deflation extended into a 28th month with a 2.3 percent drop, flat with the index’s contraction in December.
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