China's consumer price index dropped by 0.3 per cent, running counter to the trend of inflationary worries present in the West.
Deflation
China's CPI dropped 0.3 per cent from the same month last year, the first such decline since February 2021.
An economist quoted by Bloomberg said that the statistic clearly showed that China was experiencing deflation, but that the real question was "for how long?"
Meanwhile economists in China played down the significance of the statistic, saying that it was due to a particularly high base of comparison from the year before.
In addition, the 0.3 per cent reduction was less than the predicted 0.4 per cent.
CBS News said that China's deflation emanated mainly from its transportation and food sectors, with pork prices down by nearly a quarter from last year.
Without considering the food and energy prices, China's CPI would have risen by nearly 0.8 per cent.
According to Investopedia, inflation calculations often exclude food and energy prices as their prices can be "too volatile and fluctuate wildly".
Singapore's core inflation excludes private transport and accommodation costs to "better reflect" the expenses of Singaporean households.
Inflation
CBS News also said that China's struggles with deflation was an oddity in the current economic environment, where most developed countries, especially the United States and the United Kingdom have been struggling with high inflation.
While the U.S. has largely managed to reduce its inflation to around 3 per cent, the UK's Office of National Statistics has said that the country's inflation is still about 7.6 per cent.
The UK's inflation peaked in 2022 at around 11.1 per cent, and remains significantly higher than Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's promise to halve it, and much higher than the Bank of England's 2 per cent target rate.
Isn't this a good thing?
While consumers might seemingly welcome deflation's falling prices, for economies, a small amount of inflation, usually about 2 per cent, is thought to be desirable.
China's relatively weak economic indicators have led some to warn about a "Japanification" of China's economy.
Japan's economy was white hot throughout most of the 1980s, but it eventually fell into what has been termed an "deflationary death spiral", where growth stagnated for several decades.
However in China's case, analysts interviewed by CBS News believed that there was a significant difference between Japan's and China's cases, with China's government still possessing several levers with which they can counter deflation.
But that is not to say that China does not face several economic worries, with the BBC highlighting China's "ongoing property market crisis", and falling exports and imports.
China, apart from an initial burst of economic activity right after the end of its Zero Covid policy, has been slow to recover from the pandemic.
Eswar Prasad, a trade expert from Cornell University interviewed by the BBC said that China's government would likely have to implement significant stimulus measures, such as tax cuts, in order to increase private sector confidence, increase consumer spending, and convince businesses to invest again.
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