The underlying consumer price index of Hong Kong for October fell 0.3 percent year on year, statistics authority said.

The composite consumer price index rose by 2.2 percent year on year, representing a larger growth than that in September, the Census and Statistics Department of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government said.

However, the underlying CPI inflation, or the year-on-year rate of change after netting out the effects of the one-off relief measures in place during October last year, remained the same as that in September, the department said.

A spokesman for the HKSAR government attributed the slightly negative underlying inflation rate to the absence of prices pressures, both local and external.

The recent rather stable movements of the seasonally adjusted underlying composite CPI tend to suggest, "Deflationary pressures should be rather contained," he said.

Netting out the effects of one-off relief measures, the average monthly rate of change in the underlying Composite CPI for the three-month period that ended in October was 0.1 percent, and that for the three-month period that ended in September was virtually nil.

Larger year-on-year increases in prices were recorded in October for electricity, gas and water, mainly because some households had used up the full amount of HKSAR government's one- off electricity charge subsidy.

On the other hand, declines in prices were recorded for durable goods, food, transport and miscellaneous services.

For the first ten months of this year as a whole, the composite CPI rose by 0.4 percent over a year earlier.