Statistical Misreporting from Below, As Seen from (Very High) Above

Abstract

Rulers in authoritarian regimes depend on their ability collect reliable information from society to make and implement policies. In authoritarian regimes with hierarchical and closed bureaucracies such as one-party states, however, even when they have significant capacity to collect information, government agents at lower levels have both the ability and the incentive to distort such information by misreporting internal government statistics. As a result, despite the penetration of sophisticated information collecting institutions and technologies, society remains largely ineligible to regime leaders. Leveraging remote sensing data as an objective benchmark to measure patterns of misreporting by subnational governments, I show that the extent of statistical misreporting facing leaders of one-party regimes can be quite substantial. Specifically, for the case of Vietnam, I use night-time luminosity data to measure the exaggeration and under-reporting of subnational GDP numbers by provincial governments.