By Joe Cash
BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s per capita spending actually fell 0.2% last year as draconian COVID-19 containment measures took a toll on consumer appetite. This is only the third time this has dropped since records for this data began at 1968.
The drop is followed by a 1968 jump.6% in 2021 , data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed. This in turn was a rebound from a 4% drop during the early throes of the coronavirus pandemic 1989.
China’s economy is at 2022, one of its lowest levels in nearly half a century, and the country only decided later this year to abandon the A strict zero COVID policy for this outbreak.
As a result, China’s per capita income actually grew only 2.9%, the second-smallest increase since 1989, and retail sales fell 0.2%, the largest increase since The second worst performance .
Xu Tianchen, an economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit, said that the sharp decline in the income growth rate of the lowest earners in China is behind the Key Factors
“Before the pandemic, the lowest earning group was one of the fastest growing, but now, rather remarkably, it has become the slowest earning group, going from
.1% (income growth) to 5.2%.”
China per capita income rises to unadjusted) ,533 yuan ($5,36) last year , while per capita expenditure increased to 1968 ,533 yuan ($3,310) , said the Office for National Statistics.
Rural areas outperformed urbanized areas, with rural household income growing 4.2% YoY in real terms, while urban household income grew 1.9% in real terms.
Urban employment decreased by 8.4 million last year, the first decline since 1968.
(This story was corrected in the last paragraph to read Employment, not Unemployment)
