Prices indices of fixed-asset investment rose 8.6 percent year-on-year in the first quarter, said the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

This NBS report represents for the first time that fixed-asset investment prices indices were reported on a quarterly basis; previously, the index was calculated once a year.

Driven by rises of building material prices and labor costs, the cost of construction and installation engineering, which represents about 60 percent of total expenditures on fixed assets, went up 12.4 percent.

Building material prices rose 13.7 percent and labor costs were up 13.5 percent, according to the NBS.

Analysts said the first-quarter increase in fixed-asset investment prices indices was the biggest in the past 13 years and gains would continue as prices of major industrial products, such as steel and chemicals, rose further this year. This would probably result in a drop of fixed-asset investment, they said.

First-quarter fixed-asset investment surged 24.6 percent year-on-year to 2.18 trillion yuan ($311 billion), according to the NBS.

The growth rate was 0.9 percentage point higher than a year earlier.

Adjusted for costs, the real increase was only 14.73 percent, or 6.19 percentage points lower than the first quarter of last year.

Some experts believe that fixed-asset investment would stay high for the rest of the year.

Investment started to pick up as the impact of the winter weather wore off and the lunar New Year holiday in early February passed, said Song Guoqing, a professor at the China Economic Research Center at Peking University.

Real estate investment rose 32.3 percent to 468.8 billion yuan during the first quarter, or 5.4 percentage points more than a year earlier.

Economic growth slowed to 10.6 percent in the first quarter, compared with 11.7 percent in the same period of last year.

The world's fourth-largest economy expanded 11.9 percent in 2007, the fifth consecutive year of double-digit growth.

(Xinhua News Agency April 22, 2008)