The “discrepancies” you refer in this state-sponsored research paper published by a hostile, violent, authoritarian, genocidal, regressive, and oppressive regime that has held power in its country for decades is hardly to be trusted at face value. This authoritarian country has a cultural history of lying, cheating, and manipulating the truth for their own personal and racist objectives. It’ll take a long time before a country like that will be civilized enough to be trustworthy. That said, if you actually READ the report, it talks about primarily logistical issues, 2 political events (GLF and Tienanmen) that have absolutely nothing to do with the trustworthiness of the their data but rather are quite literally propagandistic elements to make the reader BELIEVE that Chinese reporting is somehow more untrustworthy than the author’s of the paper when when the number of examples of falsified data coming out of their own country could fill multiple volumes.
Meanwhile, most of the report is about potential discrepancies, not actual discrepancies, with very few examples peppered throughout to make it seem like they’re saying more than they are.
At the same time, China literally publishes five-year plans, executes on them, reports on them every year, then publishes new five-year plans. How much more transparent than literally every other nation on the planet could China be before you admit you’re wrong? Do they need to build a massive surveillance project and ghettoize all of their lumpen so they can get you accurate population counts like the North Atlantic countries do?
Regarding transparency, governments such as the US, UK, and Australia publish not only the results of metrics like inflation but also the methodology applied to determine the results.
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/methods-overview.htm
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices#methodology
https://www.abs.gov.au/methodologies/consumer-price-index-australia-methodology/mar-quarter-2023
Can you direct me to the resource where I can find a similar level of detail for the Chinese economy?
Nope. Why are those specific metrics more important than 5-year plans? What makes it “more transparent” instead of simply “more accurate”? Who are the publications for? Private investors trying to make a profit? Is it possible that China isn’t willing to put as much effort into reporting for that purpose? Why can’t the US, UK, and Australia publish 5-year plans?
Why are those specific metrics more important than 5-year plans?
Because a plan is just an intention or wishful thinking. Inflation data is an actual, measurable result.
Inflation data is one of the most common economic measurements and it can be reasonably expected that every country should be able to not only report on the inflation metric itself, but provide details on the measurement and the methodology used so that every country, globally, knows that the metric reported by each country is transparent and credible. Understanding the methodology then allows analysts to investigate the underlying drivers of the inflation result, confirm its accuracy, and compare it between countries by using similar methodologies.
Simply put, if a country can’t provide detailed explanations on how they determine an important metric like inflation, then what does that suggest about other metrics or results that they share?
