BEIJING: China’s retail sales last month grew at their fastest clip since the start of the year, official figures showed Friday, an encouraging sign for Beijing as it looks to boost sluggish consumption. Officials have since late September unveiled a slew of measures including interest rate cuts and debt swaps intended to boost activity in the world’s second-largest economy, which has struggled to regain momentum since the pandemic.

Among the woes facing policymakers are slumping domestic consumption resulting in deflationary pressure, a property sector bust and geopolitically fraught trade disputes. Retail sales expanded 4.8 percent on-year in October, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said, speeding up from the 3.2 percent in September. The reading also significantly outperformed the 3.8 percent forecast in a Bloomberg survey of analysts and represents the best reading since February.

Figures also showed the national urban unemployment rate fell slightly to five percent from 5.1 percent in September. However, industrial production growth edged down to 5.3 percent in October, the NBS figures showed, from 5.4 percent the previous month.

The NBS said in a statement that in October “positive factors accumulated and increased and the national economy was stable, with progress and growth”. Beijing is pushing for an official national growth target this year of around five percent, a goal 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 fresh life into the economy. The new policies have included a debt swap program to ease the burden on local governments, mortgage rate cuts and the elimination of certain restrictions on home purchases. “The economy stabilized in October because of the policy shift in late September,” wrote Zhang Zhiwei, President and Chief Economist of Pinpoint Asset Management, in a note.

But Zhang warned that the “property sector has not turned around”.

The market is now turning its attention to the new year, with prospects of an intensified trade war under US president-elect Donald Trump, Zhang added. “The key question is how much fiscal stimulus China will run to counter potential export slowdown.” — AFP