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Title: The Growing Problem With China's Unreliable Numbers

Link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/11/19/1635239/t...

Chinese economist Gao Shanwen told a Washington panel in December that
China's real GDP growth might be around 2% rather than the official figure
near 5%. By January, Gao was no longer chief economist at SDIC Securities and
went silent for almost a year. As FT points out in a long piece, China does
not publish quarterly GDP breakdowns showing consumption, investment and net
exports. Every other major economy produces these figures. The IMF in 2024
gave China a C grade for national accounts. The rating puts China on par with
India and below Vietnam. Fixed asset investment data showed negative growth
in 2025 for only the second time in decades. Property investment has fallen
consistently since 2022. But official GDP investment data shows no signs of
declining. The National Bureau of Statistics stopped publishing sectoral
breakdowns of fixed asset investment in 2018. It discontinued a price series
in 2021 and a land sales series in 2023. Beijing has restricted researcher
access rather than addressing longstanding questions about data quality.
China says it disagrees with the IMF's C rating. The government argued its
production-side GDP approach is appropriate. Why does it matter? China is too
large and too interconnected with the global economy for unreliable data to
be a purely domestic issue. The lack of transparency creates problems for
everyone trying to make decisions based on understanding China's economic
trajectory. As Eswar Prasad, a professor at Cornell University and former IMF
official, told FT: China is one of the two biggest economies in the world.
"It would be nice to know what is really going on."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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