China's broad measure of money supply (M2) grew 13.8 percent in December from a year earlier, slower than its target of a 14 percent rise in 2012, central bank data showed Thursday.
The growth rate of M2 in December was 0.1 percentage points lower than in November, but still 0.2 percentage points higher than the same period of the previous year, the People's Bank of China, the central bank, said on its website.
"The slightly slower growth of M2 may have helped keep the country's inflation last year down to a reasonable level," Zhuang Jian, a senior economist at Asian Development Bank in China, told the Global Times Thursday.
The M2, which is a major indicator of inflation, is the amount of money in a country's economy, or the actual amount of bank bills and coins in circulation plus money in checking and savings accounts.
Although the growth of M2 was slowing down, the country's total social financing aggregate, which is a measure of liquidity in the economy, has witnessed fast growth, standing at 1.63 trillion yuan ($261.6 billion) in December, up from 1.14 trillion yuan in November, according to the central bank.
Analysts said the data indicated that China's macro-economy has entered a stable upward development trend.
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