Well, I think it’s pretty clear that in an enormous, poor, authoritarian country you’re never going to get official statistics that are quite right. But there’s been a lot of disagreement since the recession really hit about exactly how unreliable Chinese economic data is. Officially, their stimulus program is working well and though growth is well down from its peak, it’s still quite robust. But there are a lot of doubts out there, but Jamil Anderlini from the Financial Times casts some further doubt.
The crux of the matter is that in addition to national economic statistics, China’s regions publish numbers. If you tally up the regional numbers, you basically always get a figure that’s higher than the overall national number, presumably because the leadership in each region has an incentive to fudge. And now:
In recent years, provincial figures have suggested consistently the world’s third-largest economy is bigger than Beijing’s published estimate, but the discrepancy appears to have widened this year.
Even state-controlled media reports and editorials have in recent days raised questions over their accuracy.
The Global Times, controlled by the People’s Daily, the Communist party mouthpiece, reported that the public reacted with “banter and sarcasm” to NBS figures showing average urban wages in China rose 13 per cent in the first half to $2,142.
John Makin has a helpful explanation of how China does national accounting statistics and how that interacts with the stimulus.
Previous in TP Yglesias
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