China’s Consumer Inflation Rate for 2007

The country’s chief statistics official,Xie Fuzhan, director of the National Bureau of Statistics in an appearance Thursday at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, made the comment that China’s consumer inflation rate for 2007 should be about 4.5 to 4.6 percent. Last year, China’s consumer inflation rate was 2 percent.

The forecast was in line with those of other officials and private economists.

Inflation spiked to a monthly rate of 6.5 percent in October 2007 which was mainly attributed to the rise in food prices due to shortages of some items. But those shortages are expected to end soon as a new crop is harvested, and price rises for other items such as fuel have stayed low.