[RidingPegasus]

Would you like to provide some evidence to the contrary for that or just a general "It's probably not true"?

You could say the same about Western government debt that's creatively accounted, unemployment rates which avoid underemployment/participation and inflation which desperately needs to remain low to keep bond rates from bankrupting public balance sheets.

[dirtyid]

Here are a couple western think tanks who evaluated recent Chinese economic stats - CSIS in particular comprehensively reverse engineered Chinese GDP reporting from ground up- and concluded China is (1 trillion USD) larger than official numbers purports to be.

Whole "Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak” Sun Tzu thing.

Broken Abacus? A More Accurate Gauge of China's Economy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOxIJMjZOUo&

Louis-Vincent Gave: China- myths, propaganda and realities | SKAGEN New Year Conference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9hFAlqKmfM

[RidingPegasus]

My own government in Australia has the official unemployment rate which is contradicted every time with independent analysis by a well-known multinational firm. Not fractions of a percent either, full percentage points difference.

Argue about pennies all you want. China are eating up more and more of world GDP. In 1998 they produced 3% of the worlds total output. Choose whatever source you want to see where it is now.

Either people can wake up to it or continue consuming media pleasantries that make them feel better.

[linkregister]

The Fed has been talking about U6 since before Yellen took the chair. The Fed's entire dovish stance on interest rates was publicly predicated on low labor force participation being unaccounted-for slack.

The unemployment rate vs labor force participation has been a part of Presidential debates since 2012, and also figured in the 2010 Congressional elections.

If you want to know more about how U.S. government debt is accounted for, the various Federal Reserve websites are informative, if a bit dry.

The China growth rate is probably not far from the truth, but there is not much public data published to back it up. It's reasonable to be skeptical. I think there's reason to believe that their actual growth rate is higher in some years and lower in others, as an artifact of the difficulty in getting accurate numbers.

I'm curious about your comparison of China to the United States. It seems like a whataboutism argument, which isn't really to the point of the topic.

[RidingPegasus]

> if a bit dry

That's part of the problem. Journalists avoid a deep dive into the nitty gritty that might muddy the narrative. Of course economists discuss this and are more aware of it than any other group. But how stats are presented (marketed?) on the outside should be of concern to anyone caring about their own democratic system where this stuff sways millions of votes.

> seems like a whataboutism argument

It's tiring to see this said here. Quite sure it's not tolerated much lately as a singular/only response either. It is ingrained human nature to compare others, particularly those with similar traits. To shut down discussion with a single word is incredibly disingenuous and unhelpful to modern discourse.

Give me 10 mins and I can tell you 100 things the US does far better than China. I really doubt the same claims of whataboutism would be made in the opposite direction.

Don't let nationalism cloud your judgement friend. It's a big wide diverse world with a bunch of viewpoints.

[linkregister]

> whataboutism

Fair enough, it's a term that is only accurate if the arguer is employing deception. You were not. You genuinely didn't know about labor participation being a large part of the public discourse for the past 9 years.

[metildaa]

China has been cooking the books on their GDP for years: https://geopoliticalfutures.com/china-admits-its-statistics-...

[deehouie]

Oh I think you may be right. They might have been understating their GDP. I remember few yrs ago Bloomberg wrote a piece explaining why the Chinese bureaucrats have incentives to under-report.

[RidingPegasus]

I'm talking about this figure. Asking for evidence to the contrary that it's not 6.3%. If so what do you think it is? 3%? 2%? Perhaps 6.1%?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-25/china-s-l...

[Fjolsvith]

Newer research says it could be half the 6.3%.

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/bpea_20...

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/2189245/c...

[RidingPegasus]

Thanks, which page or figure on the Brookings pdf should I be looking at?

[Fjolsvith]

Try page 1:

"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 adjustments made by the NBS average 5% of GDP since the mid-2000s. On the production side, the discrepancy between local and aggregate GDP is entirely driven by the gap between local and national estimates of industrial output. On the expenditure side, the gap is in investment. Local statistics increasingly misrepresent the true numbers after 2008, but there was no corresponding change in the adjustment made by the NBS. Using publicly available data, we provide revised estimates of local and national GDP by re-estimating output of industrial, construction, wholesale and retail firms using data on value-added taxes. We also use several local economic indicators that are less likely to be manipulated by local governments to estimate local and aggregate GDP. The estimates also suggest that the adjustments by the NBS were insufficient after 2008. Relative to the official numbers, we estimate that GDP growth from 2008-2016 is 1.7 percentage points lower and the investment and savings rate in 2016 is 7 percentage points lower."