Why Is Growth in Developing Countries So Hard to Measure?

摘要

GDP and growth estimates in developing countries are often perceived to be fraught with problems and potentially manipulated. For example, when Nigeria's government changed the way it calculated GDP in 2014, the country's official GDP grew 89 percent overnight, raising concerns that the statistics were being manipulated for political purposes (as reported in The Economist 2014). This GDP revision updated the base year from 1990 to 2010, reflecting the economy's changing structure and giving greater weight to growing industries like mobile technology. In China, GDP growth estimates have been routinely called into question since the mid-2000s, and recent studies estimate that official Chinese statistics overstated average annual growth by 1.8 percentage points between 2010 and 2016 (Chen et al. 2019). In India, Subramanian (2019) estimates that changes in data sources and methodology in 2011 led to an overestimation of annual growth by 2.5 percent between 2011 and 2012 and 2016 and 2017. Concerns are not confined to growth overestimation. Kerner, Jerven, and Beatty (2017) find that some lower-income countries underreport economic growth to maintain foreign assistance.