Roundtable on Chinese Economic Statistics Introduction

Abstract

This roundtable aims to direct the attention of China specialists, particularly in the economics field, to issues surrounding the accuracy and veracity of China’s economic statistics. Over the past two decades, China’s statistical agencies have showered researchers with a growing range of systematic and detailed data about economic performance at the national, sectoral, provincial, and local level. Periodic censuses of population, industry, services, and agriculture, and surveys of households and enterprises, some conducted with the participation of international agencies and overseas scholars, reveal additional information. Energetic efforts by China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS, Guojia tongjiju, formerly known as the State Statistics Bureau) to align published data with standard categories of national income accounting and other international conventions have enhanced the comparability, and hence the research value of Chinese statistics. While recognizing the inevitable limitations of quantitative measures of a huge and diverse economy, few economists have hesitated to utilize standard yearbook data for analytic and comparative research. A number of authors have discussed possible biases in the data for population, cultivated acreage, manufacture of new products, industrial fixed assets, output of township and village industries, unemployment, agricultural labor and other specific categories. Several studies suggest mild upward bias in official figures for long-term growth of GDP and industrial production. Nonetheless, most informed observers appear to share Marton’s (2000) view that ‘‘China’s demographic, social, and economic statistics are abundant and fairly reliable by developing country standards’’ (p. 202).