China tackles dodgy data

published 3 February 2017

Nobody trusts China's economic statistics. The sum of the provinces' output "regularly exceeds the published national GDP figure", says Bloomberg.com. Liaoning, one of the biggest regions, last year reported a sharp fall in fixed-asset investment.

That was a correction from overinflated levels, says Economist.com, but it could have prompted the government to deliver unnecessary monetary stimulus. Now the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has launched a new online system where a million large firms can report figures directly, bypassing local officials.

NBS teams in the provinces will also stop sharing offices with regional counterparts. But will these efforts be enough to boost confidence in official statistics?

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Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.