China’s statistics bureau defended the reliability of its data, emphasising the government wants quality growth, not fast expansion, and so does not need to artificially inflate the data, Trend reports referring to South China Morning Post.
“China isn’t chasing fast growth – the growth rate can come down as long as it’s quality growth, employment is ensured, prices are controlled and the manufacturing environment is improving,” Mao Shengyong, director of the Department for Comprehensive Statistics at the National Bureau of Statistics, said.
Even if it is slower, quality growth of that sort was acceptable, Mao said.
Therefore, the central government had no motivation to ask statisticians to make the number higher, he said, adding that he had not experienced that kind of pressure personally.
Without accurate data, the government will struggle to understand what is actually going on in the economy, which is critically important as growth slows.
While authorities have strengthened supervision, stepped up punishments and opened a webpage to name and shame local authorities after a number of provinces were found to be overstating gross domestic product, China watchers still are not fully convinced official statistics are accurate yet, citing anomalies in data such as industrial profits or retail sales.
“There were some problems before in the compiling of statistics but they weren’t that serious and so through much hard work over the last few years, we dealt with it,” said Mao.
Previously, some local governments had faked data and there had been methodology issues such as double counting of inter-provincial business activity, which meant that the aggregate of provincial output was larger than the national gross domestic product, he said.
The bulk of the 31 provinces in China – according to mainland Chinese media reports – have lowered their 2019 economic expansion goal from those set for last year, and the central government is also widely expected to announce a lower national target in March.
“We’ve been able to deal with the problems by changing the methods we use and also because the attitudes of the local government officials have changed. They’re no longer intent on high growth rates,” said Mao.
China’s manufacturing contracted again in January, as fears of further economic slowdown mount.
The monthly purchasing managers’ index (PMI) saw a slight improvement in January, from 49.4 in December to 49.5, but this could not keep the manufacturing sector for contracting for a second successive time with a reading below 50 indicating shrinkage.