MORE of China's urban households expect inflation to pick up in the fourth quarter and nearly half of respondents in a recent survey deemed current price levels "unacceptable," the central bank said yesterday.

About 61 percent of the 20,000 households in 50 cities all over the country said they expect consumer prices to continue to rise towards the year's end, the People's Bank of China said in its quarterly survey on its Website.

The ratio, a record, was 11.1 percentage points higher than a quarter earlier, according to the central bank.

China's consumer price index swelled 6.5 percent in August, the fastest monthly growth in a decade. The survey also said that 47.1 percent of the households believed that "the current price is too high to be accepted," a rate that compared with 25.9 percent in the first quarter and 29.5 percent in the second.

Only 3.5 percent of the respondents in the survey noted that the consumer price is "satisfactory" for the third quarter, down respectively 4.9 and 7.5 percentage points from the second quarter and the same period last year.

In addition, the survey found that 44.3 percent of the households believed the best choice to manage income now is to buy stocks or funds, compared with 25.3 percent favoring bank savings.

Meanwhile, the ratio of the households that hope to buy apartments within three months rose for the first time in eight quarters by growing 0.2 percentage point from a quarter earlier to 16 percent, the survey said.

In a separate survey among enterprises, the central bank said it found confidence among corporate executives posted the biggest drop on record in the third quarter over jitters that the economy may overheat.

The survey, which covered 5,635 companies nationwide, showed that entrepreneurs' confidence dropped 6.4 percentage points from a quarter earlier to 77 percent.

The decline was mainly due to "an obvious increase in worries among entrepreneurs over economic overheating," the central bank said.