Inflating economic statistics is an old commie trick going back 100 years to the days of Lenin. Low-level bureaucrats at the local level inflate production numbers to make their regional bosses happy. The regional bosses inflate the numbers to make national party leaders happy. By the time the numbers are publicized, they are laughably overblown.
According to Brookings, much of the manipulation in Chinese official government statistics takes place at the local level. In what the FT described as "a legacy of Maoist state planning", authorities in Beijing hand down growth targets to local officials, who use it to goalseek the official statistics they hand back.
"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 study's authors said.
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