A worker rushes to finish orders for special steel products at a factory of China Baowu Steel Group's specialty steel subsidiary in Maanshan, East China's Anhui Province on Sunday. The company aims to achieve breakthroughs in core technologies this year, with its customized rail transit parts accounting for over 60 percent of the domestic market. Photo: cnsphoto

China's top economic planner introduced a new measure on Thursday to tighten the compile of prices index for important commodities and services following a period of surging prices.

The National Development and Reform Commission released a measure on price index of important commodities and services on its official website on Thursday which is to be implemented on August 1.

The measure is aimed at standardizing market prices for important commodities and services, including bulk commodities, and promoting the healthy development of China's price index market, according to the commission.

To ensure the price index reflects the true market conditions, the price index named under "China" and "state" must provide the proportion of market transaction scale where the data is collected in the national market so that the sample data can effectively reflect the market prices of the whole country. For regional indexes it should also provide the proportion of the transaction scale where the information is collected in the regional market.

To ensure the accuracy of the original price data and the representativeness of the samples the measure also made requirements on the selection criteria of source of sample price collection.

The introduction of the measure comes after some bulk commodities rallied in the past month which has deviated from the fundamentals of supply and demand, and exceeded the reasonable range of restorative increase.

Through a series of measures, market speculation had already begun to cool, with the prices of some bulk commodities, such as iron ore, steel, copper edging back on varying degrees, said Meng Wei, a spokesperson with NDRC.

National Food and Strategic Reserves Administration has announced on Thursday to release a batch of national reserves of copper, aluminum and zinc ready for open bidding among middle and lower reaches of processing and manufacturing enterprises, with policies inclining to small and medium-sized enterprises.

Authorities will continue to increase market supply, relieve enterprise cost pressure, and help price return to a reasonable range, according to NDRC.

NDRC will closely monitor market and price changes, strengthen supervision on the spot and futures markets, while implementing price control policies to protect standard of living and ensure that the market supply and the price of daily goods and commodities are balanced, Meng said.