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2015-10-9 22:56
That China's official economic data cannot be trusted is now received wisdom among western economists, investors and policymakers. To treat the numbers as authoritative is to invite ridicule: believers are naive at best and, at worst, stooges for Communist propaganda.
The problem with this conventional wisdom is that, aside from the closely watched and politically sensitive real gross domestic product growth rate, other official data vividly depict the slowdown in China's economy that sceptics insist is being concealed. If there is a conspiracy to disguise the extent of harder times in China, it is an exceedingly superficial affair. The surprise devaluation of China's currency in mid-August fuelled scepticism about official GDP data, as many interpreted the move as evidence that Beijing was taking drastic action to rescue an economy in deep trouble. China officially posted 7 per cent real GDP growth for the first half of 2015, bang on the full-year target that Premier Li Keqiang announced in March. To the sceptics, it was both too convenient and incongruous with other data that suggested a deeper slowdown in manufacturing and residential real estate construction, the country’s economic powerhouses. Experts on China's national accounts data broadly agree that the quarterly real growth figure is subject to politically motivated “smoothing” aimed at reducing the appearance of sharp swings in the economy, especially in response to external shocks like the Asian financial crisis in 1998 and the global financial crisis in 2008. This goal is achieved mainly by tweaking the inflation metric used to convert between nominal and real growth, known as the “GDP deflator”. By understating inflation, China's statistics masters can create the impression of faster real growth. Making sense of the trends Yet the shortcomings of this single data point do not seriously impede our understanding of trends in the Chinese economy. One need look no further than nominal GDP figures, which express economic output in current prices, without adjusting for inflation, to observe the bleak state of the country's main industries. “China has some of the least volatile real GDP growth of its kind in the world, but nominal GDP data look more reasonable in a number of key aspects,” Wei Yao, China economist at Société Générale, wrote last month. Nominal GDP growth in China's industrial sector, which includes manufacturing, mining and utilities, grew at a paltry 1.2 per cent in the second quarter of 2015, down from an average of 5 per cent in 2014. For construction, second-quarter growth was 4.1 per cent compared with 9.8 per cent last year. Meanwhile, services are now the fastest-growing sector of China’s economy. Nominal growth is more important than its inflation-adjusted counterpart for most purposes. A company making revenue projections, for example, has little use for real growth rates. Similarly, commodity exporters in Latin America and Africa see the slowdown in Chinese commodity imports reflected in customs data on both import volumes and product value. Carsten Holz, an economics professor at Hong Kong University of Science & Technology who has also taught at Harvard and Stanford, is a stout defender of China's official data. He says Beijing’s use of the deflator as a fudge factor is “intensely annoying to detail-oriented analysts but only marginally relevant for practical purposes”. He doubts that Mr Li or his deputies directly instruct the National Bureau of Statistics to report a particular growth figure, but he acknowledges that the agency faces pressure to meet targets and avoid stoking economic pessimism. In theory the GDP deflator should be the broadest measure of inflation for all goods and services produced in China, including those not counted in the consumer price index. CPI covers consumables but not investment goods or services like logistics or law. The official statistics agency provides few details on how the GDP deflator is calculated, but Mr Holz believes that only the five-person Communist party cell within the statistics bureau would be privy to final deliberations. That group includes commissioner Ma Jiantang and his three deputies, including Xu Xianchun, head of the national accounts department. “Xu Xianchun sits at the table, and he knows, ‘Well, we should push it up a bit if we can.’ He looks at his documents and he says: ‘We can use this deflator, or we can equally justify using that deflator. OK, we're going to use that one because it leads to a tiny bit higher growth rate,’” Mr Holz says. This is hardly a confidence-inspiring vision of Chinese data compilation. Yet Mr Holz sees no better alternative. He has stress tested the official growth rates using several alternative deflators based on published price indices like CPI and the producer price index, which tracks wholesale goods. He concludes that China’s average annual real growth rate between 1978 and 2011 — officially 9.8 per cent — may have been as low as 9.1 per cent or as high as 11 per cent. That still leaves the official rate as the best guess. “I prefer the official data. I think they are the best data out there. I agree that there’s a range of final [real GDP growth] figures, all of which are equally justifiable. The 7.0 [per cent] figure for 2015 could be in an interval of 6.5 to 7.0 per cent or [even] 7.2,” says Mr Holz. For his part, Mr Xu last month took to People’s Daily, the official Communist party mouthpiece, to defend his agency against accusations that the GDP deflator has understated domestic inflation in recent quarters by failing to adjust for the impact of falling commodity prices. Mr Holz’s most formidable intellectual antagonist is Harry Wu, economics professor at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo . He first offered an alternative assessment of China’s GDP data in 1995 and has spent 20 years refining his methodology. His latest research finds that China’s average annual real GDP growth for 1978 to 2014 was 7.1 per cent, 2.5 percentage points below the official estimate of 9.6 per cent. That is more than double the margin for error that Mr Holz calculates. Mr Wu says growth last year was 3.9 per cent, compared with the official figure of 7 per cent. Mr Wu initially mentored Mr Holz but their intellectual dispute later caused the two to fall out with each other. “It got to a point where Harry Wu wasn't talking to me and wasn't citing my work,” says Mr Holz. “I didn't agree with his work. It just didn't convince me. I thought it was actually wrong.” As worries about China’s economy have seized global headlines, many analysts in London and Singapore — some new to the study of its national accounts — have weighed in on the reliability of the data. Michael Parker, economist for Bernstein Research in Hong Kong, is illustrative of the bird’s-eye view approach, but disagrees with the sceptics. “The idea of getting tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of accountants and statisticians across China to march consistently in a crooked line — and to do that for a decade or more — sounds, to us, implausible,” he says. To follow the more rigorous debate between Mr Wu and Mr Holz, by contrast, is to plunge down a rabbit hole of benchmark revisions, input-output tables and competing hypotheses about productivity growth in the services sector. Few analysts have tried to score the match punch by punch. Yet what is striking is how much the two agree on. In particular, both point to problems with how the NBS, the statistics agency, measures the industrial sector, the backbone of the economy. The NBS stopped publishing raw figures for industrial output in 2008. Glaring problems had become an embarrassment to the extent that by 2007 monthly production data from large-scale enterprises showed that such output was greater than the total industrial output reflected in quarterly GDP data. Logically, that is not possible. Such paradoxes are blamed on over-reporting of output by companies and local governments. Local GDP growth has traditionally been an important factor used by the Communist party to evaluate performance and decide who is to be promoted up the ranks, though that is slowly changing. Where Mr Holz and Mr Wu differ is largely their response to these flaws. Mr Holz broadly trusts that Mr Xu of the NBS, acting as a gatekeeper, is able to filter out the most glaring over-reporting when his national accounts division receives data from colleagues in the industrial statistics division and transforms it into the industrial component of GDP. For him, nominal GDP figures are mostly accurate, leaving the deflator as the main issue. Mr Wu, by contrast, considers the industrial GDP data irredeemably flawed by the need of local officials to hit targets. Both men see shortcomings in China’s data collection, but Mr Wu’s calculations diverge from the official data most acutely during crisis periods. His conclusion is that the error is “not mainly caused by methodological deficiencies, but instead by political influences”. Mr Wu’s scepticism propelled him to create a parallel data series for industrial output built around a Soviet-style list of names and quantities of industrial products manufactured in China each year from steel pipes to toasters. “If local governments want to fabricate or manipulate commodity production stats, they can't do it. There are too many, and it's too complicated. You would need to be professional,” he says. Industrious truth seeker To Mr Holz, Mr Wu's alternative series, which contributes to a much larger downward revision of China's real growth rates over decades, does not offer any improvement over the official data that both agree are flawed. He argues that it is impossible reliably to derive industrial output in value terms because of difficulties in measuring improvements in product quality and assigning inflation-adjusted prices to newly developed goods. The quality question is crucial for whether price increases are interpreted as additional real output or simply inflation. Mr Wu says his methodology incorporates reasonable assumptions about product quality and new development. Yet this is an awkward moment for his radical rejection of China's industrial production data. The monthly industrial output series, long viewed as suspect, shows a sharper decline than is reflected in the overall GDP growth rate. Indeed, this incongruity is the biggest source of scepticism about China's true GDP growth rate. The likelihood that the growth rate is subject to manipulation reflects institutional weakness, notably the lack of independence of the NBS. But it also results from an analytical failing by those who assess China and other economies. If the emphasis on this single number were not so excessive, the incentive to massage it would be less. The sooner real GDP growth loses its totemic significance, the sooner we are likely to receive more accurate data. For China and other governments for whom economic growth is the main guarantee of political legitimacy, the temptation to fudge will always exist. But in a scenario where China’s economy is in such dire straits, that stability is threatened, relying on a single figure to persuade that things are great is unlikely to prove an effective political strategy. 如今,中国的官方经济数据不可信已是西方经济学家、投资者和政策制定者普遍接受的共识。认为这些数据权威会招致嘲笑:说相信这些数据的人天真已经是最客气的了,最不客气的是称他们为中共宣传的帮闲。
这一共识的问题在于,除了备受关注、具有政治敏感性的实际国内生产总值(GDP)增长率,其他官方数据生动地描绘出了怀疑论者坚称被隐瞒的中国经济放缓。即便有阴谋试图掩饰中国的境况到底变得有多艰难,中国经济遇到了困难也是一件非常显而易见的事情。 人民币在8月中旬意外贬值,进一步助长了外界对中国官方GDP数据的怀疑,许多人认为此举证明北京方面在采取激进举措拯救深陷困境的中国经济。 中国官方公布的2015年上半年实际GDP增速为7%,正好达到中国总理李克强在3月宣布的全年增长目标。对持怀疑态度的人来说,这个数据太合适,也和其他表明中国的两个经济引擎——制造业和住宅房地产建设——出现更严重放缓的数据不一致。 中国国民经济核算方面的专家普遍认同,中国会出于政治动机“熨平”季度实际增长数据,这种处理旨在让经济的剧烈波动看起来不那么严重,尤其是在应对像1998年亚洲金融危机和2008年全球金融危机那样的外部冲击的时候。 这一目标主要是通过微调用于将名义GDP换算成实际GDP的通胀指标(即“GDP平减指数”)实现的。通过将通胀报低,中国的统计高手们可以制造出实际GDP增长比事实上更快的效果。 理解趋势 然而,这个数据点的不足之处并不会严重妨碍我们对中国经济趋势的理解。只需看一看不经通胀调整、以当前价格水平表达经济产出的名义GDP数据,就能观察到该国主要行业的惨淡状况。 “中国实际GDP的波动性是世界同类国家中最小的,但其名义GDP数据在一些关键方面看起来更为合理,”法国兴业银行(Société Générale)的中国经济学家姚炜上月写道。 2015年第二季度,包括制造业、采矿业和公共事业的中国工业部门名义GDP仅微幅增长1.2%,低于2014年平均5%的增速。建筑业名义GDP在第二季度增长4.1%,去年这个数字为9.8%。另外,服务业目前是中国经济增长最快的领域。 就大多数用途而言,名义增长率比经过通胀调整的实际增长率更为重要。比如,实际增长率对企业做收入预测就没什么用。 类似的,拉美和非洲的大宗商品进口商通过进口量和产品价值方面的海关数据,都可以看出中国大宗商品进口放缓。 也在哈佛(Harvard)以及曾在斯坦福(Standford)担任访问教授的香港科技大学(HKUST)经济学教授卡斯滕?霍尔兹(Carsten Holz)是中国官方数据的坚定捍卫者。他表示,北京利用平减指数来修改数据,这一点“对注重细节的分析师来说非常讨厌,但对实际应用只有微小影响”。 他认为李克强或者副手未必会直接指示中国国家统计局报告一个特定的增长数值,但他承认,该机构面临达到增长目标、避免催生经济悲观情绪的压力。理论上,GDP平减指数应该是考查中国所有商品和服务的最广泛的通胀衡量指标,包括那些没有计入居民消费价格指数(CPI)中的商品和服务。CPI涵盖了消费品,但不包括投资品,也不包括物流或法律等服务。 这家中国官方统计机构没有提供多少有关GDP平减指数计算方法的细节。不过,霍尔兹认为,只有国家统计局党组的几名成员对最终的考虑知情。这几个人有国家统计局局长和他手下的三名副局长,包括现任国家统计局副局长、曾担任国民经济核算司司长的许宪春。 霍尔兹说:“许宪春参与了讨论,他对此是知情的。他会看着手中的文件说,‘嗯,如果可以的话,我们应该让它高一点。我们的平减指数可以用这个数值,或者用那个数值也说得通。好吧,就用那个数值,因为用它计算出来的实际增长率会稍高一点。’” 这样的中国数据编制场景,很难说会让人产生信心。不过,霍尔兹认为没有其他更好的选择了。他用多种基于CPI和工业生产者出厂价格指数(PPI)等公开价格指数计算出来的另类平减指数,对官方增长率进行过压力测试。 他得出的结论是,中国在1978年到2011年之间的平均年度实际增长率(这一增长率的官方数据是9.8%)可能在9.1%到11%之间。这个结果意味着官方的增长率仍不失为最有可能符合真实情况的数值。 霍尔兹表示:“我更偏向于官方数据。我认为,官方数据是现有的最好数据。我同意存在一系列最终(实际GDP增长率)数字,所有数字都同样合理。2015年(百分之)7.0的数值,可能是从6.5到7.0,(甚至)7.2之间的一个点。” 作为中国国家统计局副局长,许宪春上个月在中共党报《人民日报》(People's Daily)上撰文,针对相关指控为国家统计局做了辩护。这些指控称,国家统计局采用的GDP平减指数,未能针对大宗商品价格下跌的影响作出调整,从而低估了最近几个季度国内的通胀率。 霍尔兹在学问上最可怕的对手,是东京一桥大学(Hitotsubashi University)经济学教授伍晓鹰(Harry Wu)。伍晓鹰在1995年第一次提出了另一种评估中国GDP的方法,并在之后的20年不断完善他的方法。他的最新研究认为,中国在1978年到2014年之间的平均年度实际GDP增长率为7.1%,比官方估计的9.6%低了2.5个百分点。这比霍尔兹计算得出的误差幅度超出了一倍以上。伍晓鹰表示,中国去年的增长率是3.9%,而官方数字为7%。 伍晓鹰起初曾指导过霍尔兹,然而他们在学问上的分歧后来导致两人发生争执。 霍尔兹表示:“当时事情闹到伍晓鹰不跟我讲话,也不援引我的研究。我不认同他的研究。他的研究就是无法说服我。我认为,他的研究实际上是错的。” 随着对中国经济的担忧占据全球各大媒体头条,许多伦敦和新加坡的分析师(其中一些以前并没有研究过中国国民经济核算)也参与到对中国数据可靠性的探究中来。 伯恩斯坦研究公司(Bernstein Research)驻香港经济学家迈克尔?帕克(Michael Parker),就是采用宏观式方法的典型。不过,他并不认同怀疑论者的看法。 他说:“在我们看来,认为中国会让全国数万甚至数十万财会及统计人员,在十年乃至更长时间里,步调一致地歪曲数据,这样的想法听起来让人难以置信。” 相比之下,要想了解伍晓鹰和霍尔兹之间更严谨具体的辩论,就要一头扎入另一个世界,研究基准数字修订、投入产出表、以及有关服务业生产率增长的各种相互竞争的假设。没有多少分析师曾试图具体判定两人在每个回合辩论中的得分。不过,有意思的是他们两人在许多地方取得了共识。尤其值得注意的是,两人都指出了国家统计局对作为经济支柱的工业部门的统计方法存在的问题。2008年起,中国国家统计局不再发布工业产出的原始分行业数据。 在中国国家统计局停止发布工业分行业产出数据之前,一些突出问题已经变得相当尴尬,以至于到了2007年,规模以上企业的月度产出数据加起来超过了季度GDP数据显示的工业总产出。从逻辑上讲,这是不可能的。 数据的矛盾应归咎于企业和地方政府虚报产出。地方GDP增长历来都是共产党用来评估政绩以及决定官员升迁的重要因素(尽管这种现象正在慢慢发生变化)。 霍尔兹与伍晓鹰之间的分歧主要在于他们对这些缺陷的回应。 霍尔兹基本上相信,作为把关者,中国国家统计局的许宪春在其国民经济核算部门接收到工业统计部门同僚发来的数据,并将其转化为GDP工业组成部分时,有能力将最显眼的虚报数据滤除掉。霍尔兹认为,名义GDP数据大都是准确的,主要问题就只剩下平减指数了。相比之下,伍晓鹰认为,由于地方官员有实现增长目标的需要,工业GDP数据从根本上存在缺陷。 两人都看到了中国在数据收集方面的不足,但伍晓鹰的计算与官方数据差异最大的时候是在危机时期。他的结论是,这些误差“并非主要由方法上的缺陷造成,而是由政治影响造成的”。 怀疑促使伍晓鹰根据一份苏联式产量清单(包括中国每年生产的、从钢管到烤箱的各种工业品的名称及对应的数量),创建了一套并行的工业产出系列数据。 “即便地方政府想要编造或篡改商品生产统计数据,他们也无法做到。数据量太大,这样作假也太复杂。需要非常专业的人,”他说。 不辞辛苦探寻真相的人 在霍尔兹看来,伍晓鹰拿出的另一套系列数据(这套数据对中国几十年来实际增长率的下调幅度要大得多)并不比两人都认为有缺陷的官方数据更好。 他认为,不可能在价值上得出可靠的工业产出,因为产品质量的改善难以衡量,对新发明的商品赋以经通胀调整后的价格也存在困难。关于产品质量改善的问题很重要,关系到是将价格的增加当作实际产出的增加,还是仅仅当作通胀。 伍晓鹰说,他的方法包含了对产品质量和新发明的合理假设。然而,对于彻底不相信中国工业产出数据的他来说,眼下是个尴尬的时刻。长期受到怀疑的月度工业产出系列数据表现出的降幅,比总体GDP增长率表现出的降幅更大。实际上,这两组数据的不一致是导致人们对中国的真实GDP增长率产生怀疑的最大原因。 增长率受操纵的可能性反映了制度缺陷,尤其是反映出国家统计局缺乏独立性。但这也是那些评估中国和其他经济体的人士在分析上存在缺陷所导致的结果。如果不如此过度地强调GDP,那么操纵这一数据的动机将不会那么强。 实际GDP增长率越早失去其标志意义,我们就越早可能得到更准确的数据。对中国政府以及其他依靠经济增长保证其政治合法性的政府来说,在数据上作假的诱惑总会存在。但是,在中国经济处于如此危急时刻、以至于威胁到稳定时,依靠一个单一的数字来说服民众相信形势一片大好,其实不太可能会是一项有效的政治策略。 译者/何黎 |