A Multiregional Economic Comparison

Abstract

The lack of high-quality and comparable cross-section data is always the major hurdle in any study of multiregional economic issues, particularly in the centrally planned economies (CPEs). During the pre-reform period, China only published a fragmentary set of data covering such indicators as national income, gross value of social product (GVSP), gross value of agricultural output (GVAO) and gross value of industrial output (GVIO), the reliability of which, however, is uncertain. The recent research environment has been increasingly improved, along with the transformation of the Chinese economy from the centrally planned system to a market-oriented system. Since the early 1980s, an increasingly complete set of data on national regional economic performances have been released, some sources of which are shown in Table 7.1. Regardless of this progress, many problems, however, still exist when one tries to apply the officially published data to conduct a multiregional comparison of the Chinese economy. Open image in new window Table 7.1 Main source for China’s statistical data