China has become a popular geographic area of research. Researchers make extensive use of Chinese official statistics, but these statistics are often not well understood. This article first clarifies three major issues that affect a wide range of Chinese statistics — from output and employment...

Investment statistics of the People's Republic of China are a source of many puzzles. Some investment data are of dubious quality, while the particular concepts of investment and their changing definitions over time are often poorly understood. Fixed asset investment, a remnant of the planned...

Investment statistics of the People's Republic of China are a source of many puzzles. Some investment data are of dubious quality, while the particular concepts of investment and their changing definitions over time are often poorly understood. Fixed asset investment, a remnant of the planned...

While China's official statistics are often regarded as of questionable quality, critics are rarely aware of just how difficult it is to compile accurate statistics in a developing and transition economy. This paper traces the challenges economic reforms pose for the development of China's...

Since the 1998 "wind of falsification and embellishment," Chinese official GDP statistics have repeatedly come under scrutiny. This paper evaluates the quality of China's GDP statistics in four stages. First, it reviews past and ongoing suspicions of the quality of GDP data and examines the...

On 9 January 2006, China's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) announced a benchmark revision of GDP statistics for the years 1993-2004 based on the findings of the 2004 economic census. It released nominal values of GDP and sectoral value added (obtained following the production approach) for...