China’s headline rate of growth slowed in the third quarter, but inflation rose again slightly over the past month and economists said the underlying growth rate was accelerating.
The economy expanded by 9.6 per cent in the third quarter compared to the year before, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Thursday, a modest slowdown from the 10.3 per cent rate of expansion recorded in the second quarter.
China does not publish sequential quarterly figures for growth that are used by most countries but many private sector economists calculated that growth momentum had in fact picked up in the third quarter, compared to the previous period.