China has released its official figures for GDP growth and they come in precisely at expectations. We shouldn’t really pay all that much attention to this precisely because they did come in right at expectations. For meeting the plan is rather the thing we would expect in a country ruled by a Communist Party that claims the right to rule through the competence of its economic management. There’re a number of people out there who insist that China’s economic statistics don’t add up–and in some ways they’re entirely right. It’s not always obvious quite how the national numbers match up with the separately reported regional ones for example. Further, we see inconsistencies in a number of numbers. Things like energy consumption don’t seem to match growth numbers–that could be because large underlying changes in the structure of the economy are taking place rather than just its size but, well, not everyone is entirely convinced let us say.
But the report is that everything is exactly in line with
:
China’s economy produced the goods again last quarter, growing at the same pace seen in the first half of the year.
According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the economy grew by 6.7% year-on-year in the September quarter, a figure that was in line with expectations.
It’s this little bit that has the
:
China‘s economy expanded at a steady 6.7% in the third quarter and looks set to hit Beijing’s full-year target, fueled by stronger government spending, record bank lending, and a red-hot property market that are adding to its growing pile of debt.
The point being that the Communist Party really does derive a goodly portion of its self-perceived right to rule from the manner in which a good communist party can and should plan the economy. Thus there’s a certain expectation that economic growth will turn out to be, later in the year, about what the planners said it would be earlier in the year. There’s almost an undercurrent of thought that China’s economic statistics will only become interesting when they don’t accord with the plan. Because that’s when those statistics will contain interesting
:
China’s economy has managed a curiously singular feat for any country: Growing a steady rate of 6.7 per cent for the third quarter in a row.
“It’s definitely unusual in an international context,” noted Julian Evans-Pritchard, a China economist at Capital Economics on Wednesday. “There are almost no countries that have such stable GDP growth rates.”
The GDP trifecta is the first since at least 1992 when Reuters began compiling data.
“It suggests quite significant smoothing of the data behind the scenes. Even by Chinese standards, this is quite rare,” Evans-Pritchard said.
Others are a little less polite about it all.
for example.
The bottom line here is that no one is very surprised that China’s GDP growth figures are slap bang in the range that the government said they should be. And there’s at least a thought that this is more to do with government stating that this should be so than it being real information about that economy itself. But even so, the numbers aren’t wildly divergent from reality.
