I understand what you posted, but I really require absolute proof, not just perceived evidence if I'm going to believe that several elite investment firms are wrong and a casual economics reader is right.
Where the definition of absolute proof is what? Clearly something that won't be possible to get. That retail sales in China are supposed to be bigger than the whole consumption part of the economy is proof enough for me. You are obviously free to believe whatever you want.
I think I've already written all the points to these before. For the Mizuho-eMarketer conflict, they show the same trend, and were published 2 years apart. Sometimes, there are adjustments and new data are amended to previous years' numbers.
Their USA data is clearly significantly different, by around 20%. There is no way there was any adjustment of this magnitude. Are you willing to acknowledge that these "elite investment firms" contradicted each other in terms of data used for the American market? And further, that two other elite firms contradicted both of them on American and Chinese numbers?
For AT Kierney, it's important, then, to find the source they are actually getting their numbers from, to understand it fully.
Do we also need a source for Mizuho and eMarketer? The A.T. Kearney report is the most "open" of the ones we're discussing, as we have the full report, with authors, contributors and sources listed.
By the looks, it may be what Deloitte is using (but in different year), which, I've said before, is also a widely-accepted number. That indicates to me that there are multiple ways to calculate the retail market or retail sales, but it doesn't mean that one way is wrong and the other is right because PwC's 2015 analysis and eMarketer's 2016 piece are also widely cited and accepted even if we can't find the original report for PwC.
Once again, PwC has issued two very different reports both in 2015 and by your logic, they directly conflict with each other very badly. (Even if the report is not here to dissect, the conclusion is very clearly written and "contradicts" the other report in data and in conclusion.) I believe that the chances of that mistake is much lower than the chances of there being something "mysterious" that you don't understand.
I think it's very likely you're laboring under a misapprehension about how these things work. When one of these reports is produced, it's not the collective work of the whole company, with hundreds or thousands of experts working together. Neither is it reviewed by the board of directors. There is usually a handful of authors (four for the A.T. Kearney report). It's very likely that in the case of the two PwC reports, the authors never met and possibly never read each other's work. One of the reports was focused on Mexico and produced by PwC Mexico. There is no "PwC position" or "PwC knows the difference". It's typically the work of one to five people and reviewed by a few editors before publication. I shouldn't have to explain the standard for something (as in, articles about these reports) to get published in a newspaper. The journalist probably doesn't know or care about the subject in any depth and the editor checks for typos. As long as it'll attract clicks, it gets a write-up.
Similarly, you seem to place a lot of weight on being widely cited. You do know that a lot of things are also widely cited in prestigious publications, including stories of imminent Chinese collapse and fake GDP numbers? Do you take these very seriously as well or could they be wrong? Take Michael Pettis, professor of finance at Peking University, writing in the
. Impeccable credentials, there's no way he doesn't know more than a casual economics reader. Do you accept his conclusions?
So if you don't have anything new to add, think we'll still defer to two points of the last post:
1. If one of us isn't too lazy and if one of the firms isn't too busy, one of us can write an email to them (preferably PwC, the firm that uses both sets of data) and ask for an explanation.
2. Assuming we're both too lazy to do #1, it's reasonable to think that we should see this year or next, China actually surpassing the US as the largest retail market. (Of course it's possible that it takes a little longer even if they are running near even now.) By that point, there should be many more articles on it, especially on the economic headlines. We may have more to go on by then. It's the waiting game.
Feel free to report back your findings.
It's very likely that there will, in fact, be pieces saying that China's sales have overtaken the USA's. I already explained where they likely get the idea/data for this two comments back in point 2. We'll see if there's any skepticism then.
Ultimately, I do agree that retail sales is not a clearly defined category, so there's no international standard for reporting and a lot of confusion. That doesn't mean that different numbers are right at the same time. Like I said before, China isn't helping by having and promoting a uniquely named category that almost definitely measures something different than what its name implies.
I'm also in the position where I'm repeating myself, so here's my position for the last time.
Household final consumption expenditure (i.e., private spending on goods and services) is a key economic statistic (it's reported by all countries and major international economic organizations), particularly since it's part of a way to report GDP.
In 2016, it's value was 4.4 trillion USD for China and 12.8 trillion USD for the USA. This makes sense because China's GDP is smaller and its economy is based more on investment. In this context, retail sales (which should mean something like private spending on goods) of about 5 trillion USD are plausible for the USA, but not for China. For the USA, they represent about 40% of consumption, which works well with the assumption that the rest is spent on services. For China, that is more than 110% of consumption (which should be impossible by itself), while leaving zero room for services.
If anyone has an explanation, I'm very interested. Otherwise, no amount of reports will convince me of things that go against basic economic facts.
