China’s retail sales last month grew at the fastest pace since the start of the year, official figures showed on Friday, an encouraging sign in Beijing as it looks to pick up sluggish consumption.
Officials since late September unveiled a series of measures including interest rate cuts and debt swaps aimed at boosting activity in the world’s second-largest economy, which has struggled to regain momentum since the pandemic began.
Among the issues facing policymakers are a decline in domestic consumption leading to inflationary pressures, a boom in the real estate sector and trade disputes dominating the political landscape.
Retail sales rose 4.8% year-on-year in October, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said, a faster pace than 3.2% in September.
The reading also came in well above the 3.8 percent forecast in a Bloomberg survey of analysts and represented the best reading since February.
The figures also showed that the national urban unemployment rate fell slightly to 5 percent from 5.1 percent in September.
However, industrial production growth slowed to 5.3 percent in October, NBS data showed, from 5.4 percent in the previous month.
The NBS in a statement said in October “good things accumulated and increased and the country’s economy is stable, progressing and growing”.
Beijing is aiming for an official national growth target this year of around 5 percent, a target most economists believe it will narrowly miss.
But recent weeks have seen officials announce their most aggressive measures in years in a bid to breathe new life into the economy.
The new policies included a debt-modification program to reduce the burden on local governments, a reduction in mortgage rates and the elimination of certain restrictions on housing purchases.
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