A Chinese services-industry index declined to a six-month low last month, dragged down by a weaker property market.
The non-manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index fell to 54.2 from 55 in June, the Beijing-based National Bureau of Statistics and China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing said in Beijing yesterday.
A reading of more than 50 indicates expansion.
The report highlights the danger a correction in the property market poses to growth in the world’s second-biggest economy and contrasts with a Chinese government report last week that showed manufacturing expanded at the fastest pace in more than two years.
REAL-ESTATE RISK
The IMF’s China mission head said last week that real estate is the biggest near-term risk to the Chinese economy.
“Real estate continued to soften, reflecting a thin market in the low season, while the range of price discounting widened,” Cai Jin (蔡瑾), a vice chairman at the logistics federation, said in the statement.
“The decline in the index isn’t large and overall, markets are stable,” he added.
A gauge of business expectations in the survey rose to 61.5 last month from 60.4 in June, the report showed.
Services accounted for 46.6 percent of Chinese GDP in the first half of the year, 1.3 percentage points higher than the same period a year earlier, the statistics bureau said last month when it released GDP data for the last quarter.
Expansion in services quickened to 8 percent in the first half from 7.8 percent in the first quarter, and compared with a 7.4 percent pace in manufacturing, mining and construction industries, the statistics bureau’s data showed.
INDEX BASIS
The non-manufacturing index produced by the two agencies is based on responses from purchasing managers at 1,200 Chinese companies in 27 industry groups, including catering, retailing, construction and transportation.
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