China's CPI up by 1.6% in November

December 09, 2022: China's consumer price index (CPI), a main gauge of inflation, rose 1.6% year on year in November, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said Friday.

On a monthly basis, the CPI edged down 0.2%, affected by domestic COVID-19 outbreaks and seasonality, noted Dong Lijuan, a senior statistician with the NBS.

Food prices reversed the 0.1-percent gain in October to fall 0.8% month-on-month, lowering the monthly consumer inflation by about 0.14 percentage points, according to the data.

Specifically, the price of pork, a staple meat in China, edged down 0.7% in November from the previous month. Authorities have been releasing pork from the central reserves in recent months and hog production kept rising, Dong said.

However, pork prices still hiked 34.4% year on year, narrowing by 17.4 percentage points from the previous month.

Non-food prices rose 1.1% from a year earlier, unchanged from October. The prices of gasoline, diesel, and liquified petroleum gas went up by 11.4%, 12.3%, and 4.6% year on year, respectively.

Friday's data also showed that China's producer price index, which measures costs for goods at the factory gate, slid 1.3% year on year in November.

Xinhua/APP