China's GDP is growing at 6.3%. What was the last time the US grew at even close to that rate?
It's not clear to me the extent one can trust the official numbers from China.
You could say the same about Western government debt that's creatively accounted, unemployment rates which avoid underemployment/participation and inflation which desperately needs to remain low to keep bond rates from bankrupting public balance sheets.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-25/china-s-l...
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/bpea_20...
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/2189245/c...
"China’s national accounts are based on data collected by local governments. However, since local governments are rewarded for meeting growth and investment targets, they have an incentive to skew local statistics. China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) adjusts the data provided by local governments to calculate GDP at the national level. The adjustments made by the NBS average 5% of GDP since the mid-2000s. On the production side, the discrepancy between local and aggregate GDP is entirely driven by the gap between local and national estimates of industrial output. On the expenditure side, the gap is in investment. Local statistics increasingly misrepresent the true numbers after 2008, but there was no corresponding change in the adjustment made by the NBS. Using publicly available data, we provide revised estimates of local and national GDP by re-estimating output of industrial, construction, wholesale and retail firms using data on value-added taxes. We also use several local economic indicators that are less likely to be manipulated by local governments to estimate local and aggregate GDP. The estimates also suggest that the adjustments by the NBS were insufficient after 2008. Relative to the official numbers, we estimate that GDP growth from 2008-2016 is 1.7 percentage points lower and the investment and savings rate in 2016 is 7 percentage points lower."
Whole "Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak” Sun Tzu thing.
Broken Abacus? A More Accurate Gauge of China's Economy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOxIJMjZOUo&
Louis-Vincent Gave: China- myths, propaganda and realities | SKAGEN New Year Conference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9hFAlqKmfM
Argue about pennies all you want. China are eating up more and more of world GDP. In 1998 they produced 3% of the worlds total output. Choose whatever source you want to see where it is now.
Either people can wake up to it or continue consuming media pleasantries that make them feel better.
The unemployment rate vs labor force participation has been a part of Presidential debates since 2012, and also figured in the 2010 Congressional elections.
If you want to know more about how U.S. government debt is accounted for, the various Federal Reserve websites are informative, if a bit dry.
The China growth rate is probably not far from the truth, but there is not much public data published to back it up. It's reasonable to be skeptical. I think there's reason to believe that their actual growth rate is higher in some years and lower in others, as an artifact of the difficulty in getting accurate numbers.
I'm curious about your comparison of China to the United States. It seems like a whataboutism argument, which isn't really to the point of the topic.
That's part of the problem. Journalists avoid a deep dive into the nitty gritty that might muddy the narrative. Of course economists discuss this and are more aware of it than any other group. But how stats are presented (marketed?) on the outside should be of concern to anyone caring about their own democratic system where this stuff sways millions of votes.
> seems like a whataboutism argument
It's tiring to see this said here. Quite sure it's not tolerated much lately as a singular/only response either. It is ingrained human nature to compare others, particularly those with similar traits. To shut down discussion with a single word is incredibly disingenuous and unhelpful to modern discourse.
Give me 10 mins and I can tell you 100 things the US does far better than China. I really doubt the same claims of whataboutism would be made in the opposite direction.
Don't let nationalism cloud your judgement friend. It's a big wide diverse world with a bunch of viewpoints.
Fair enough, it's a term that is only accurate if the arguer is employing deception. You were not. You genuinely didn't know about labor participation being a large part of the public discourse for the past 9 years.
If the government tweaks regulations, lending criteria and does other things to trigger huge spending on building pointless ghost cities, that will legitimately increase GDP because GDP is just summing up "stuff being done". There's a very subtle but deeply embedded assumption in western talk about GDP: that high GDP indicates a lot of useful things are being made and sold. But in a hard-left economy like China that correlation is weak; it's possible for lots of people to be doing things that aren't useful.
Plus, you really trust the number which come from CCP?
Do you trust Bloomberg? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-25/china-s-l...
CITE: Relative to the official numbers, we estimate that GDP growth from 2008-2016 is 1.7 percentage points lower and the investment and savings rate in 2016 is 7 percentage points lower.
Ref: https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/a-forensic-examinati...
Provided evidence to the contrary.
Do you think this GDP number is wrong and if so by how much?
I trust CCP statistics as much as I trust western reports about China. Which is to say, not at all.
China probably isn’t as rich or powerful as it projects, but it’s also clearly not as weak and fragile as American media has been hoping all these decades.
Their population growth is lower than most of the West, some argue it even contracted last year. Why is everyone on this site so wildly misinformed about the largest country on Earth? Is this a US thing?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/17/world/asia/ch...
Also, largest country on Earth? I do believe China is #4 after Russia, Canada, and the US in terms of SquareKM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
I personally think any country that can economically prosper without resorting to unsustainable population growth or environmental damage should be congratulated on the world stage.
China is managing to do one of those things.
Technological advancement should be the focus of developed nations wanting to thrive without taking the easy gdp heroin hit of over-populating, which is essentially unaccounted future debt heaped upon younger generations.