China's consumer price index (CPI), a main gauge of inflation, dipped 1.1 percent year on year in the first nine months of this year, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said Thursday.

The September CPI was up 0.4 percent over the previous month.

However, the NBS did not provide the reading of September CPI on an annual basis. CPI declined 1.2 percent in August from a year earlier, the seventh consecutive month of decline since the index dropped 1.6 percent in February, the first fall since October 2002.

The producer price index (PPI), a major measurement of inflation at the wholesale level, dropped 6.5 percent year on year in the first three quarters of this year, the NBS said.

The September PPI rose 0.6 percent from a month earlier.

(Xinhua News Agency October 22, 2009)