Beijing — China’s industrial output growth held steady in January and February, official data showed on Tuesday, providing further evidence of stability in the world’s second-largest economy despite slower retail sales growth. Industrial output rose 6.3% year on year in the first two months of 2017, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), slightly beating the 6.2 forecast in a Bloomberg News survey. Retails sales, a key indicator of consumer spending, increased 9.5% over the period, down from 10.2% in the same period last year. Sales grew 10.9% in December. Fixed-asset investment, a gauge of infrastructure spending, rose 8.9% year on year in January-February. Property investment increased a surprising 8.9% in the period, up from 3.0% over the same stretch in 2016, despite tighter regulations to thwart speculators and guard against a feared property bubble. Most data were "quite positive" and "apparently improving", NBS spokesperson Sheng Laiyun said in a news briefing....
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