News Snapshot:
Li’s scepticism is supported by a wealth of evidence of data manipulations in China. A 2018 paper by Luis R. Martinez, a public policy professor at the University of Chicago, showed China had one of the largest gaps between reported GDP and estimated economic activities among the 179 countries examined. From 1992 to 2006, Martinez found, there was an “exaggeration bias” of 29 per cent in China’s official growth rate. Another study, using tax payments and other data, estimated that between 2008 and 2016, the country’s GDP growth rate was probably overstated by 1.7 percentage points on average. This is...