Market News International:

How much does service consumption currently contribute to economic growth? How do you anticipate the performance of service consumption in the fourth quarter of this year? In terms of future service consumption data, are there any further plans to better reflect the changes in Chinese residents' consumption? 

Sheng Laiyun:

Thank you for your questions. So as to comprehensively show the changes in the consumer market, the NBS recently adjusted and improved its trade economic statistical methods and rules. Apart from improving the statistical approach on the total retail sales of consumer goods, a service consumption market statistical supervision system was established. In August, for the first time, we released the growth rate of service retail sales in the first seven months of this year. The total retail sales of consumer goods mainly reflect the situation regarding physical commodity retail sales and part of the service consumption in accommodation and catering. However, with social and economic development, especially industrial upgrading and consumption upgrading, service consumption is accelerating, and its proportion to consumption is increasing. So as to demonstrate the changes in the consumption market, we also added service retail sales for release.

Both merchandise and service retail sales maintained rapid recovery in the first three quarters of this year. In January-September, total retail sales of consumer products and services increased by 6.8% and 18.9% year on year. The rapid growth of services retail sales was mainly related to the development environment in the past two years. Last year was severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, which had a great impact on the contact-based service sectors, including accommodation, catering, and transportation. Since China optimized its pandemic response measures, the country's economic operations have returned to normal, and the service industry, especially the contact-based segments, has benefited the most. People have traveled more frequently, and the catering sector has become increasingly popular. Service consumption has recovered quickly. 

Another indicator is per capita service consumption expenditure. In the first three quarters of this year, per capita service consumption expenditure increased by 14.2% year on year, accounting for 46.1% of the total per capita consumption expenditure. This was an increase of 2 percentage points compared with the same period last year. We can see that the economy is on a recovery track. Spurred by a series of consumption-stimulating policies, China's consumption market, especially service consumption, has rebounded and recovered well.

We will further improve the statistical survey system of service consumption and the entire consumption market. Currently, we only release statistics on cumulative growth rates of service retail sales, and we will release more data after the statistical methods and system are further improved. Detailed accounting data on the contribution rate of service consumption to GDP are not available at present. The contribution rate of consumption to economic growth reached 83.2% in the first three quarters of this year, a significant increase over the same period last year. Service consumption, with a relatively high growth rate, played an important role in driving economic growth.