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Comment by chris_t | Hacker News Reader

The unreliability of those figures will be no surprise to anyone who follows China's economy or politics closely, and I hope this bodes for better quality statistics in the future.

There's a small industry of people who try to measure Chinese growth in other ways that are harder to forge such as railway shipment tonnage and energy consumption; it'll be interesting to see to what extent those methods are vindicated if/when better quality data becomes available.

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Chinese GDP is not a sum of locally reported GDPs. Locally reported GDPs have always exceeded the total GDP, sometimes by a large margin. Now they may lag.

A large motivation is how the taxes collected are shared between the central government and the local governments. A new tax sharing scheme introduced last year makes underreporting of the local GDPs profitable for the local governments, meaning they get to remit less taxes to the central government.

Oh, that makes sense. I'd hoped the trend was towards a higher level of reliability but perhaps it's just a change of direction in the manipulation.

If you look at large companies' accounts, they typically have inter segment reconciliations. Where intra-company trades are booked can be artificial. In the Chinese case, the city of Tianjin, e.g., which has a financial district, booked revenues from companies registered there but conducting no substantial business there in its own local GDP. This is akin to the state of Delaware including in its own GDP report (if there is such a thing) all companies registered there. But this inflation has no effect on the national GDP, which is aggregated over the businesses directly, so it does not matter how many provinces claim the businesses as their own. Hope this helps put things in context a little bit for you.

If we assume 20-30% of gdp claim from most of the provinces in China are fake, then that reduces their overall GDP from 11.2T to probably around 9-10T, only about double Japan's 5T, and about half of US's 19T and way less than EU's 17T. Nowhere near taking over US/EU anytime soon, and probably falling into a lost decade for China. And with the 3% gdp growth from US recently, US economy is looking very bright.

Easter and Western politics, socialize, communism, capitalism, share the same means to an end, political parties trying to retain power and often have nothing to do with the people.

That is known as the Li Keqiang Index. As you might know Li is the current premier, but he has been made pretty powerless by Xi.

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