Beijing, Apr. 16 : Though China''s economy has expanded by 6.1 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2009, the quarterly growth is the slowest in the past 10 years as the global financial crisis continues to affect the world''s fastest-growing economy.

It was 4.5 percentage points lower than the first quarter of 2008 and down 0.7 percentage points from the previous quarter, reports Xinhua.

Gross domestic product (GDP) reached 6.5745 trillion Yuan (about US$939 billion) in the first quarter, Ma Jiantang, director of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), told a press conference.

Industrial output grew 5.1 percent year on year in the first quarter this year, with a rise of 8.3 percent in March.

Consumer price index, a main gauge of inflation, fell 1.2 percent year on year in March. This was compared with a decline of 1.6 percent in February, the first monthly fall since December 2002.

China''s producer price index (PPI) fell 4.6 percent in the first quarter year on year. However, the statistics agency did not give a year-on-year figure for PPI in March, but said it declined 0.3 percent in March compared with February, a smaller monthly rate of decline than in the previous two months.

Retail sales grew 15 percent to 2.94 trillion Yuan (430.4 billion U. S. dollars) in the first quarter this year.

China has started to implement a 4 trillion Yuan ($585 billion) stimulus package to counter the impact of the global slowdown, helping prompt a surge in lending in the first three months of the year.

"The overall national economy showed positive changes, with better performance than expected," the NBS said in a statement distributed ahead of a news conference. (ANI)