Over 33% intend to increase their investments, says PBOC survey

One-third of Chinese people plan to invest more, with nearly half of them preferring wealth management products, a central bank survey showed Tuesday.

About 33.9 percent of urban households intend to invest more, down 0.6 percentage points from the previous quarter, according to a quarterly survey by the People's Bank of China (PBOC).

The top three investment choices are wealth management products from banks, securities companies and insurance companies (49.2 percent), fund trust products (20.5 percent) and stocks (19.3 percent).

Some 42.3 percent of urban households plan to save more, down 0.1 percentage point from the previous quarter, while 23.8 percent said they plan to spend more on consumption, 0.7 percentage points higher than the fourth quarter of last year.

Around 52.2 percent of urban households found housing prices "unacceptably high", 42.9 percent "acceptable", and 4.9 percent "satisfactory".

Some 22.9 percent of the households polled said they intend to buy a house in the next three months, 2.8 percentage points higher than the fourth quarter of last year.

Another PBOC survey showed rise in business confidence among China's entrepreneurs in the first quarter of 2017 compared with the last quarter of 2016. The entrepreneur confidence index grew to 61.5 from 54.1 the previous quarter and 43.7 during the same period last year.

Bankers' confidence in the economy also rose in the first quarter, up sharply by 11.2 percentage points from the previous quarter to 64.9 percent.

Xinhua contributed to this story.