Employees work at an assembly workshop of FAW-Volkswagen Automobile Co Ltd in Changchun, Jilin province, on Sept 1, 2020. [Photo/Xinhua]

China's value-added industrial output, an important economic indicator, continued to recover as factories stepped up production amid effective COVID-19 control, official data showed Tuesday.

Industrial output went up 5.6 percent year on year in August, accelerating from a rise of 4.8 percent registered in July, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

On a month-on-month basis, industrial output rose 1.02 percent in August, also quickening from July's 0.98-percent increase.

In the first eight months, industrial output expanded 0.4 percent from one year earlier, compared with a decline of 0.4 percent in the January-July period, NBS data showed.

Meanwhile, China's retail sales of consumer goods, a major indicator of consumption growth, expanded for the first time this year.

In August, the total retail sales of consumer goods reached 3.36 trillion yuan (about 492.08 billion U.S. dollars), rising 0.5 percent year on year.

In the first eight months, the total retail sales of consumer goods reached 23.8 trillion yuan, down 8.6 percent year on year, narrowing by 1.3 percentage points compared with that in the first seven months.