Sceptical Attitude Toward China's Statistics Groundless, Says OfficialHolding a sceptical attitude toward China's economic growth statistics is groundless, China's statistics official said."I've read some articles criticizing China's statistics, the logic, method and even some arguments of these articles are wrong," said Qiu Xiaohua, deputy director of the National Bureau of Statistics, at a press conference held on April 17 by the State Council Information Office. One formulation is that China's economy maintains growth, but China's energy consumption seems to not only fail to grow rapidly, but also decline somewhat, thereby doubting the reliability of China's statistics, according to the director. In fact, as long as one looks into the history of economic development in various countries around the world, it is not hard to discover that at some stages and in some years, the phenomenon of energy consumption being lower than economic growth generally existed in many countries. The United States, Japan, the Republic of Korea and Germany witnessed decline in energy consumption, but growth in the economy in many years; or the growth of their energy consumption was rather low, but their economic growth was fairly high. "This is because in the economic development of a country, due to changes in technology and structure, different trends would appear in the relations between economic development and energy consumption," he said. "Due to the rise of technological level and changes in the industrial structure over the past decade, China's GDP energy consumption dropped around 5 percent annually on average. This fully shows that economic growth can be boosted through economizing on energy." The second formulation is that the increase in China's communications and transportation is not in coordination with its economic growth, Qiu said. In other words, the growth of the volume of air passenger transport, and the growth of the volume of road haulage and that of the volume of rail freight are lower than economic growth, thereby doubting China's statistics. "In fact, tremendous changes have taken place in China's transportation system over the past few years," Qiu said. Take road transport for example, currently the main force undertaking China's road traffic is no longer State-owned transport companies, but rather 70-80 percent are non-State transport companies, he added. "Under such circumstances, it is obviously inappropriate to examine China's statistics in light of the growth of State-owned transport companies," the director said. The third so-called evidence behind the skepticism about China's economic statistics is that the gap between China's urban and rural areas is rather wide, the growth of the urban economy is not enough to make up the decline of the rural economy, according to the director. "Although currently there are still 63 percent of China's population living in the countryside, the proportion of the output of the rural land makes up only about 16 percent of China's total economic output," he said. "Although China's urban population accounts for only 37 percent of the gross population, the proportion of the urban economy to the entire economy reaches at least 60 percent." "If one fails to know these actual conditions of China's economy, it is impossible for one to make correct judgment and appraisal of China's statistics," said the official. |
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