{"id":1059,"date":"2014-07-02T15:35:23","date_gmt":"2014-07-02T14:35:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.asimmetrie.org\/?p=1059"},"modified":"2023-10-12T10:34:14","modified_gmt":"2023-10-12T09:34:14","slug":"wp-201403-the-quality-of-chinas-gdp-statistics","status":"publish","type":"publication","link":"https:\/\/asimmetrie.org\/en\/pubblicazioni\/wp-201403-the-quality-of-chinas-gdp-statistics\/","title":{"rendered":"WP 2014\/03: The quality of China&#8217;s GDP statistics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Since the 1998 \u201cwind of falsification and embellishment,\u201d Chinese official statistics on gross domestic product (GDP) have repeatedly come under scrutiny. This paper evaluates the quality of China\u2019s GDP statistics in four stages. First, it reviews past and ongoing suspicions of the quality of GDP data and examines the evidence. Second, it documents the institutional framework for data compilation and concludes on the implications for data quality. Third, it asks how the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics could possibly go about credibly falsifying GDP data without being found out. Fourth, it examines if the first- and second-digit distributions of official GDP data conform to established data regularities (Benford\u2019s Law). The findings are that the supposed evidence for GDP data falsification is not compelling, that the National Bureau of Statistics has much institutional scope for falsifying GDP data, and that certain manipulations of nominal and real data would be virtually undetectable. Official GDP data, however, exhibit few statistical anomalies (conform to Benford\u2019s Law) and the National Bureau of Statistics thus either makes no significant use of its scope to falsify data, or is aware of statistical data regularities when it falsifies data.<\/p>\n<p>Keywords: C82 Data Collection and Data Estimation Methodology; Computer Programs \u2014 Methodology for Collecting, Estimating, and Organizing Macroeconomic Data; R1 General Regional Economics; P27 Socialist Systems and Transitional Economies \u2014 Performance and Prospects; O53 Economywide Country Studies \u2014 Asia including Middle East.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Since the 1998 \u201cwind of falsification and embellishment,\u201d Chinese official statistics on gross domestic product (GDP) have repeatedly come under scrutiny. This paper evaluates the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":8205,"template":"","tags":[],"topic":[],"publications_category":[14],"expert":[453],"class_list":["post-1059","publication","type-publication","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","publications_category-working-papers","expert-carsten-holz"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>WP 2014\/03: The quality of China&#039;s GDP statistics &#8211; a\/simmetrie<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/asimmetrie.org\/en\/pubblicazioni\/wp-201403-the-quality-of-chinas-gdp-statistics\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"WP 2014\/03: The quality of China&#039;s GDP statistics &#8211; a\/simmetrie\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Since the 1998 \u201cwind of falsification and embellishment,\u201d Chinese official statistics on gross domestic product (GDP) have repeatedly come under scrutiny. 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