China Gross Domestic Product (GDP) YoY
China Gross Domestic Product (GDP) YoY
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measures the annualized change in the inflation-adjusted value of all goods and services produced by the economy. It is the broadest measure of economic activity and the primary indicator of the economy’s health.
A higher than expected reading should be taken as positive/bullish for the CNY, while a lower than expected reading should be taken as negative/bearish for the CNY.
| Release Date | Time | Actual | Forecast | Previous |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 17, 2021 (Q3) | 21:00 | 4.9% | 5.2% | 7.9% |
| Jul 14, 2021 (Q2) | 21:00 | 7.9% | 8.1% | 18.3% |
| Apr 15, 2021 (Q1) | 21:00 | 18.3% | 19.0% | 6.5% |
| Jan 17, 2021 (Q4) | 21:00 | 6.5% | 6.1% | 4.9% |
| Oct 18, 2020 (Q3) | 21:00 | 4.9% | 5.2% | 3.2% |
| Jul 15, 2020 (Q2) | 21:00 | 3.2% | 2.5% | -6.8% |
By Gina Lee Investing.com – China’s economy grew at its slowest pace in a year in the third quarter of 2021, with a global energy crunch, supply chain bottlenecks, and an unsteady property market also.
By Gina Lee Investing.com – The dollar was up on Monday morning in Asia. Inflation data from New Zealand was higher than expected while data from China showed slower-than-expected economic growth.
Analysis
The week is off to a relatively flat start, in keeping with the mood last week in equity markets as investors weigh up a strong earnings season against inflation and interest rate risks. The market.
Three main forces are shaping the business and investment climate: Surging energy prices, a dramatic backing up of short-term interest rates in Anglo-American countries, and the persistence of supply.
Market Indexes: It was another positive week, with all 4 indexes advancing at least 1%, led by the S&P 500, which rose 1.64%. Thus far, October has been a big month for market gains. The Dow set a.
GDP (YoY) Discussion
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China Gross Domestic Product (GDP) QoQ
China Gross Domestic Product (GDP) QoQ
| Release Date | Time | Actual | Forecast | Previous |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 17, 2021 (Q3) | 21:00 | 0.2% | 0.5% | 1.2% |
| Jul 14, 2021 (Q2) | 21:00 | 1.3% | 1.2% | 0.6% |
| Apr 15, 2021 (Q1) | 21:00 | 0.6% | 1.5% | 3.2% |
| Jan 17, 2021 (Q4) | 21:00 | 2.6% | 3.2% | 3.0% |
| Oct 18, 2020 (Q3) | 21:00 | 2.7% | 3.2% | 11.7% |
| Jul 15, 2020 (Q2) | 21:00 | 11.5% | 9.6% | -9.8% |
By Gina Lee Investing.com – China’s economy grew at its slowest pace in a year in the third quarter of 2021, with a global energy crunch, supply chain bottlenecks, and an unsteady property market also.
By Gina Lee Investing.com – The dollar was up on Monday morning in Asia. Inflation data from New Zealand was higher than expected while data from China showed slower-than-expected economic growth.
Analysis
Into the uncertainty over the implications of Omicron, Federal Reserve Chairman injected a particularly hawkish signal into the mix in his testimony before the Senate. These were the two forces that.
At the halfway point of Q4, the markets’ focus is on three things: inflation, growth, and central banks’ response. With US and Chinese October inflation readings behind us, the focus shifts to the.
Despite China’s economic growth coming to a standstill, with only 0.2% growth in Q3, the S&P 500 was in rally mode. While stocks grind higher, bond traders are warning of slowing growth in.
GDP (QoQ) Discussion
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China GDP Growth Rate 1961-2021
| Similar Country Ranking | |
|---|---|
| Country Name | GDP Growth (%) |
| Guyana | 43.48% |
| Tuvalu | 4.40% |
| China | 2.30% |
| Turkey | 1.76% |
| Iran | 1.66% |
| Belarus | -0.90% |
| Serbia | -0.98% |
| Paraguay | -1.00% |
| Gabon | -1.32% |
| Guatemala | -1.52% |
| Jordan | -1.55% |
| Kazakhstan | -2.60% |
| St. Vincent and the Grenadines | -2.73% |
| Samoa | -2.74% |
| Russia | -2.95% |
| Albania | -3.31% |
| Romania | -3.86% |
| Brazil | -4.06% |
| Bulgaria | -4.15% |
| Azerbaijan | -4.31% |
| Bosnia | -4.33% |
| North Macedonia | -4.53% |
| Costa Rica | -4.54% |
| Equatorial Guinea | -4.89% |
| Algeria | -5.48% |
| Malaysia | -5.59% |
| Thailand | -6.09% |
| Dominican Republic | -6.72% |
| Colombia | -6.85% |
| South Africa | -6.96% |
| Armenia | -7.60% |
| Ecuador | -7.75% |
| Botswana | -7.89% |
| Namibia | -7.98% |
| Mexico | -8.24% |
| Jamaica | -10.20% |
| Iraq | -10.37% |
| Peru | -11.15% |
| Grenada | -11.23% |
| Belize | -14.04% |
| Suriname | -14.50% |
| Mauritius | -14.87% |
| Montenegro | -15.16% |
| Dominica | -16.71% |
| Fiji | -19.05% |
| St. Lucia | -20.21% |
| Lebanon | -20.30% |
| Libya | -31.30% |
| Maldives | -31.98% |
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Historical GDP of China
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article includes a list of China’s historical gross domestic product (GDP) values, the market value of all final goods and services produced by a nation in a given year. The GDP dollar estimates presented here are either calculated at market or government official exchange rates (nominal), or derived from purchasing power parity (PPP) calculations. This article also includes historical GDP growth.
The research utilized the World Bank’s method as a reference, and made numerous appropriate adjustments based on China’s national condition. The GDP also has been converted to U.S. dollar-based data by utilizing the moving average exchange rate. The research systematically completed China’s GDP and GDP per capita from 1952 to 1986 and analyzed growth rate, the change and contribution rates of each component. The research also included international comparisons. Additionally, the research compared MPS and SNA, looking at the results from the two systems from analyzing Chinese economy. This achievement created the foundation for China GDP research.
The SCC issued «The notice regarding implementation of System of National Accounting» in August 1992, the Western SNA system officially is introduced to China, replaced Soviet Union’s MPS system, Western economic indicator GDP became China’s most important economic indicator. Based on Dr. Fengbo Zhang’s research, in 1997, the National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBS), in collaboration with Hitotsubashi University of Japan, re-estimated China’s GDP Data from 1952 up to 1995 based on the SNA principal. In 2016, the 2008 SNA was formally brought into use. [1]
When comparing Fengbo Zhang’s GDP measurement in the 1980s and the GDP in 1997 by the NBS and Japan’s cooperative research, the two are found to be very consistent; the deviation rate each year is very slight, between only 0.1% and 7%. During this period, there were many data adjustments, with weighting factors undergoing significant changes along with each year’s comparable price amendments, statistical method significant changes result in the substantial deviation. Even with science and technology as advanced as it is today, the single item survey is allowed at least ±3%, or a total of 6% deviation. Despite the extremely difficult conditions of a destroyed economy, blank theory, a lack of data, and simple methods in the 1980s, there is so little deviation for such a long period of time and the comprehensiveness of the national economic indicator, indicates that the research conducted by Fengbo Zhang with the support of the extensive group he trained is extremely rigorous, and their result very precise. [2] Xie Fuzhan, former Director, and Ma Jiantang, current Director of the NBS, both participated in Dr. Fengbo Zhang’s research project in the 1980s, as assistant researcher and graduate student, respectively, of the Research Center of the SCC.
What Is GDP in China?
The Chinese economy is not growing at 6.5 percent. It is probably growing by less than half of that. Not everyone agrees that the rate is that low, of course, but there is nonetheless a running debate about what is really happening in the Chinese economy and whether or not the country’s reported GDP growth is accurate.
The reason for the widespread skepticism is the disconnect between the official data and perceptions on the ground. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, China’s economic growth in every quarter last year exceeded 6.5 percent. While that is much lower than the heady growth rates China has experienced for most of the past forty years, it is still, by most measures, a very brisk rate of growth.
And yet, when you speak to Chinese businesses, economists, or analysts, it is hard to find any economic sector enjoying decent growth. Almost everyone is complaining bitterly about terribly difficult conditions, rising bankruptcies, a collapsing stock market, and dashed expectations. In my eighteen years in China, I have never seen this level of financial worry and unhappiness.
These concerns have even breached academia. One of my students told me yesterday that there was a huge increase last semester on the university website in the number of students selling their belongings because they are hard up for cash. They are selling their phones, computers, clothing, and lots of other possessions. He said the amount of selling is noticeably higher than last year, enough so that everyone is talking about it. And he indicated that this is apparently happening at other schools too. It seems that the poor and middle-class kids are squeezed for cash because they are getting much less money from home than they have in the past.
This isn’t what you’d expect to hear from an economy growing at more than 6.5 percent. So what does it mean exactly to say that China’s GDP is growing at that pace? It turns out that there are three completely different sets of problems that affect how China’s GDP growth statistics should be interpreted. Analysts must keep these three problems straight and make sure that they don’t confuse matters by conflating these separate issues.
What Does GDP Measure?
The first set of problems relates to the meaning of GDP itself. This challenge affects not just China but the rest of the world as well. This is especially true for advanced economies with substantial technology and service sectors that employ technology whose value may be substantially understated by an inability to count it accurately.
GDP is typically assumed to measure the creation of real economic value. If a country’s GDP rises by 5 percent over the course of a year, for example, this is interpreted to mean that the amount of wealth the country produced in the last year is 5 percent greater than in the previous year. In other words, it would be assumed that the country’s ability to service debt would have increased by 5 percent, which means roughly the same thing.
But there is no way to truly measure a country’s creation of real economic value, as GDP is just a proxy for whatever it is thought to measure. Economists have agreed which measurements go into calculating GDP, and the resulting sum is referred to as a country’s aggregate GDP, or the value of everything produced locally in that economy.
Of course, not all value-creating activities are counted when GDP is measured. For instance, if you teach your friend Spanish for free, you add to the wealth of the economy, but you do not add to GDP. By contrast, if he does pay you, the country’s GDP does increase by the amount of money you are paid, even though you are adding exactly the same value to the economy itself whether he pays you or not. In addition, not all measured activity actually creates value: building a bridge to nowhere, for example, creates exactly the same increase in GDP as building a much-needed bridge.
No proxy of economic value is perfect, of course, but there are real questions about whether GDP is imperfect to the point of being useless as a proxy. Does GDP really do a good job of capturing all the value creation in an economy? While this is a serious problem everywhere, it may be even more of a problem in China because of the huge amount of investment in nonproductive activities that is counted in China’s GDP data even though this investment does not add to the country’s wealth or its debt-servicing capacity.
How Accurate Are China’s GDP Statistics?
The second set of problems has to do with how carefully and faithfully Chinese statisticians at the National Bureau of Statistics are calculating the agreed-upon elements that go into measuring GDP. Do they tend to collect the data in the way that introduces mistakes that are systematically biased (upward, to show higher than actual GDP, I would assume)? Or are they actually lying to please their political bosses?
I am pretty sure that China’s economic data collection is distorted in ways that smooth out volatility, but otherwise I assume, at least until very recently, that the National Bureau of Statistics has followed generally accepted rules for calculating GDP more or less correctly. I don’t have a high level of confidence in my assumption though: as I pointed out earlier, it is hard to find any sector of the Chinese economy that is behaving the way you’d expect a country growing at more than 6.5 percent to behave. Furthermore, especially in recent years, it has been hard to reconcile other economic proxies with the GDP numbers. (See, for example, this article by Johns Hopkins University economists Bob Barbera and Yinghao Hu, which itself refers to a satellite imaging study.)
What is more, people whose work I greatly respect, like Anne Stevenson-Yang of J Capital, seem very much to doubt the data and argue that China’s actual growth rate is much lower than the posted numbers, largely because the data is falsified at some level of the collection process. But whatever the case may be, if there is indeed a substantial discrepancy between what the statisticians actually measure and what they are claiming to measure, it is very hard to make predictions about how long the overstatement will continue and how much of an adjustment it will eventually undergo.
Is GDP Measured as an Output or an Input?
The third set of problems with GDP occurs in a very limited number of cases globally (today, China is the main example). But the implications are much greater. This has to do with whether GDP is even being used as a proxy for economic activity. In China, reported GDP does not tell observers about the economy’s performance; rather, it tells people how rapidly Beijing thinks it can impose the necessary adjustments on the Chinese economy. This is because GDP means something different in China than it does in most other major economies.
In any economic system, GDP is supposed to be a measure of output, and in most countries that is exactly what it measures, however messily. The economy does what it does, in other words, and at the end of a given time period, statisticians measure the things economists agree to include in the relevant calculations, and they express the change over time as the scale of GDP growth for that period.
This is not what happens in China, where GDP is actually an input determined annually as the country’s GDP growth target. The growth target of a given time period is decided well ahead of time, and to achieve it, various entities, including local governments, engage in the requisite amount of activity, usually funded by debt. As long as China has debt capacity, and as long as it can postpone the writing down of nonproductive assets, Beijing can achieve any growth target it desires.
But this arrangement changes the meaning of GDP. Reported GDP in China is no longer a measure of economic growth, but rather a measure of political intention. As any systems theorist knows, input data reveals nothing about the performance of a system. So when analysts discuss what reported GDP indicates about the health of the Chinese economy, such thinking involves a very basic mistake in systems theory—a systems input can only offer insights about the goals of the operators, never about the performance of the system itself.
In practical terms, this means that once Beijing sets a GDP growth target, local governments are expected to generate enough economic activity to reach that target, and they are able to borrow as much as they need to do so. If this activity were productive, there wouldn’t be a problem, although it would be an amazing coincidence (or a truly incredible feat of prognostication) for the amount of productive activity truly to equal the growth target. What would be more likely in that case is that GDP growth would consistently exceed the target, which is indeed what happened until about a decade or so ago.
But if the economic activity isn’t productive, there are two requirements that allow China to set GDP growth as a systems input in a way other countries are unable to do. First, there must be no hard budget constraints, so as to allow economic entities to persist in value-destroying behavior year after year. Second, the resulting bad debt cannot be written down. Once these two conditions are met—and they are in China’s case—Beijing can set any growth target it likes and, as long as it has the necessary debt capacity, it can achieve that target.
But notice that achieving the target reveals nothing about the country’s real economic growth, for which GDP is supposed to be (however imperfectly) a proxy. Once GDP growth becomes a systems input, rather than an output, it does not indicate anything about the economy’s health or performance.
Conclusion
There is likely to be no end this year to the discussions about China’s economic growth rate and its relationship to GDP. By now, observers widely agree that China’s economy is not as strong as the GDP data suggests. And I suspect that only a handful of the least imaginative resolutely-mainstream economists (and, weirdly enough, this is more likely to be true of foreign than Chinese ones) still believe that China’s economy is as healthy and brisk as would be expected from a country whose GDP is growing at 6.5 percent and is expected to grow next year by more than 6 percent.
The problems facing the Chinese economy, and the worries expressed by Chinese leaders, are so deep that it no longer requires much imagination to figure out that reported GDP in China simply does not represent what we think it represents elsewhere. Yet some economists have not always understood the implications, and they often seem to refuse to adjust their methodologies to take into account the aforementioned problems with China’s reported GDP data. Yesterday, for example, I read a report written by an economist that discussed the implications of China’s PPP-adjusted GDP being the biggest in the world.
But any observers that are at all skeptical about the relationship between the Chinese economy and its reported GDP must dismiss the PPP-adjustment as almost complete nonsense. (I don’t mean that the PPP-adjusted data is less accurate for China than it is for other countries: I mean, quite literally, that it is almost complete nonsense). Any ratio based on reported GDP figures can only be comparably meaningful for China to the extent that China’s reported GDP numbers have the same relationship to the underlying economy—or to whatever GDP is thought to mean—as corresponding numbers in other countries do. But surely few observers still believe that.
The point is that if there has been a divergence between China’s reported GDP figures and the country’s underlying economy, there are at least three completely different ways that this discrepancy can manifest itself. Observers too often confuse the three, however. For example, I have said many times that I believe that if China’s GDP were to be expressed in a way that is comparable with that of other countries, it would be growing at less than half the current reported growth rate.
A lot of people interpret this to mean that I think Beijing is falsifying the data, but I don’t mean that at all. In my mind, the biggest problem is that China’s reported GDP is an input into the economic system, not a measured output. To make China’s GDP figures comparable to those of other countries, the input numbers would have to be adjusted with some relevant output, such as the amount of bad debt that should be (but isn’t) written down in a given time period. If this amount were subtracted from China’s nominal GDP growth rate, the resulting adjusted growth rate probably would be a lot closer to what economists think of as GDP than the country’s actual reported GDP data is.
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Comments (48)
What are your thoughts on data points less driven by economic policy? For example, though retail sales growth has decelerated significantly, it’s currently at about 8%. This seems in line with a country growing real consumption by
6%. Also, U.S. companies like Nike are still experiencing double-digit sales growth in China. This, too, does not seem in line with a 3% real growth rate. Or is your view that maybe consumption data accurately captures economic growth but investment data does not?
Economic activity drives employment, whether or not that activity is productive, MT, and employment in turn drives consumption, so I believe that the consumption figures are fairly accurate, although because they are deflated by what may be an excessively low GDP deflator, I put more trust in the nominal consumption data than the real. By the way please do not assume that retail sales growth rates are a good proxy for consumption growth rates. The former always overstate the latter. As for sales data from individual foreign companies, it isn’t clear how representative they might be. Good data for Nike, for example, is countered by bad data for Apple. The overall feeling in China is incredibly gloomy.
Since GDP is merely a list of physical outputs, it is very difficult to use it to figure out growth rates and the real state of an economy, unless disaggregated comparisons are used. It is more useful to use proxies, indicators that suggest conditions, such as electricity consumption, wage growth, employment for men 18-55, volume of train shipping, whether stocks of metals and other inputs are growing or not. It is really a call of judgement. Using GDI (which our author seems to mean while saying «GDP») is the least useful, because monetary income can be distorted by government policy and debt, as our author says. For example in the UK (and the USA etc.) a rather significant part of GDI growth is caused by imports and by residential equity withdrawals, both debt-fueled.
Nike is probably the strongest US brand in China. Ask around.
From what I can see, China’s GDP is distorted by the non-performing loans generated by its State Owned Enterprises. While China continues to try and remove these distortions, the economic pain this causes forces the government to refrain from the reforms necessary, and is kicking the can down the road, thereby only delaying the day of reckoning.
When these proxies to measure GDP are applied to other nations economies including developed nations economies, what do they suggest? Looking at night time satellite photos, India appears brighter than China, but does anyone think India is much more developed than China? N. Italy looks much brighter than much of Germany, but should we assume that Germany’s economy in general is doing much worse than Italy’s?
I suspect many countries suffer from the first and second sets of distortions in the GDP data, Hmm, but as I argue in the essay only China suffers substantially from the third set.
I guess what I’m asking is whether looking at these second set of problem proxies, like energy output growth, or satellite light data is anymore accurate than China’s official GDP data. If China is moving more towards a service economy, then we should see energy output growth slowing down greatly. If China supposedly invested heavily in infrastructure in its earlier years of growth, then lighting would presumably be something they invested in pretty early on, and therefore growth would be slower in later years, since the amount of lighting for night time usage is probably close to equivalent to already developed country. Shouldn’t we just be using standard of living calculated by various metrics + what type of technology country can readily produce to decide whether there’s been growth or not, and how «wealthy» it is?
Michael, You have omitted something in the second section, Second Section: WHAT DOES GDP MEASURE? «..building (missing word(s)), for example, would create exactly the same increase in GDP as building a much-needed bridge.»
Thanks, Ken. It is meant to read «building a bridge to nowhere, for example, would create exactly the same increase in GDP as building a much-needed bridge.» I have asked the editors to change it.
Is this slowdown caused by the trade war or is the Chinese economy actually beginning to break due to its debt problems, in this case seemingly choosing unemployment? Or is it a little bit of both?
So far US tariffs have had a minimal impact on the Chinese economy, thoradicus, and only recently, while you can argue that the slowdown in the real economy began a decade ago, and GDP growth has only remained high because of the acceleration in debt. During this whole period, as we saw most vividly in 2018, any attempt to slow credit growth has resulted immediately in rapidly slowing GDP growth. Trade war makes matters worse because Beijing can only counter its impact with even more debt, but as I see it the real problem is clearly debt.
Another great article, Dr. Pettis. This concurs with my experience on the ground as a non economist. One question I have is related to your discussion of how China’s GDP measurement could be made to be comparable with other countries’. Since the GDP has been overstated for a while, should we eventually expect GDP to decline substantially (either because economists will get wise and decide to change the way the measurement is done, or from the hard budget constraints that you’ve mentioned before)? In other words, will the GDP be forced down by needing to make the adjustment for «bad debt» all at once? On a related note, I buy that the use of GDP as in input applies to only China right now, but do you think that the other «investment lead growth miracle» countries suffered from the same idolatry of GDP during their boom years?
The overstatement of GDP is either resolved explicitly by government action or crisis, DSA, or the cost eventually and automatically gets amortized over time in the form of lower GDP growth. Over the very long run you cannot consistently overstate GDP growth, but you can over shorter time periods, depending on how long you can postpone writing down bad debt and bad investment.
And yes, DSA, I think the problem of overstated GDP was typically of many if not most investment-led growth miracles. The key, I think, is the discipline with which bad debt is written down.
Michael Pettis has been writing this article for 13 years. It’s always the same and it’s always turned out to be wrong. He is not alone. There are many Western trolls who make a good living pouring scorn on China’s achievements (and thereby hiding them from us until it is too late to do anything). Writing about his latest book, CHINA’S ECONOMY, here’s what economist Arthur K. Kroeber says:
