According to Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development data, the average inflation rate in OECD countries reached 9.6 percent in May, up 3 percentage points from December 2021. Many developing countries are also facing severe inflation, with Turkey, Argentina and Brazil seeing double-digit inflation rates.
China's consumer price index rose 1.7 percent year-on-year in the first half of this year. In June the pace of its CPI growth reached 2.5 percent, which is still low. As the world's second-largest economy, China has restricted the rise in consumer prices, which helps restrain the worsening global inflation.
Soaring energy prices are the main drivers of rising consumer prices. They are the root cause behind massive issuance of liquidity in the United States and Europe. The energy shortage is caused by the US-led sanctions on Russia.
In the first half of this year, China produced 2.19 billion metric tons of raw coal, up 11.0 percent year-on-year, and its coal import totaled 115 million tons, down 17.5 percent. It produced 102.88 million tons of crude oil, up 4.0 percent year-on-year, and imported 252.52 million tons of crude oil, down 3.1 percent. China produced 109.6 billion cubic meters of natural gas, up 4.9 percent year-on-year, and imported 53.57 million tons, down 10 percent.
This way China increased domestic energy production, and the significant decline in energy imports has played a positive role in alleviating the imbalance between supply and demand in the global energy market.
China strictly controls the growth of energy demand by compressing the output of energy-intensive industries. In the first half of the year, China's cement output fell 15 percent year-on-year, crude steel output fell 6.5 percent, pig iron output fell 4.7 percent and steel output fell 4.6 percent.
Its electricity generation rose 0.7 percent in the first half of this year, with thermal power generation down 3.9 percent, hydropower up 20.3 percent, wind power up 7.8 percent and photovoltaic power up 13.5 percent. The three renewable energy sources accounted for 26.2 percent of the country's electricity generation in the first half of this year, 3.3 percentage points higher than the first half of 2021.
These moves are conducive to easing the upward pressure on commodities in the international market and curbing global inflation.