How cooked are the books?

摘要

Adding up the value of goods and services produced in an economy is hard enough anywhere. In China, the problem is magnified by the country's size, the rapidly shifting make-up of its quasi-market system and the widespread tendency among officials to lie in order to boost their political fortunes. Last month the government said that China's GDP had grown by 7.3% last year, making it the world's fastest-growing large economy. But growth figures declared by individual provinces told a different story. Only one, Yunnan, said its product has grown more slowly than the national rate. Taken together, the provincial figures would produce a national growth rate nearly two points higher than the one officially declared. Fortunately, the central government does not rely entirely on dodgy provincial statistics to arrive at its national growth-rate figure. Instead, the National Bureau of Statistics conducts sample surveys and uses these to estimate the country's GDP and thence the growth rate. The result has invariably been at odds with the provincial figures. In 1995, the GDP growth rate suggested by provincial data was three percentage points higher than the figure of 10.5% produced by sample surveys.