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China's GDP Growth Pace Was Inflated for Nine Years, Study Finds

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Re: China's GDP Growth Pace Was Inflated for Nine Years, Study Finds

#71
post #44
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downvoting is different from flagging. Articles can't be downvoted only flagged. If you look at the comments in the thread that have been flag killed, they are mostly low quality comments on both sides of the issue. And looking at downvoted comments, there doesn't seem to be much correlation at all between upvotes and whether the comment is critical of China.

> they are mostly low quality comments on both sides of the issue. Please have a look at the other reply I made in this thread, when someone mentioned that Li Keqiang Index and argued that it is a better indicator of China's real GDP growth, I listed recent figures to show that if Li Keqiang Index is actually more reliable, there would be higher real GDP growth. My cited numbers are from Caixin, which is considered a…

Downvotes usually settle over time.

Re: China's GDP Growth Pace Was Inflated for Nine Years, Study Finds

#72
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is huge and heterogeneous - the coastal cities are well developed and there are 100s of millions of people living in Shanghai, Beijing, Hong-Kong, Shenzhen etc who are well on their way towards western level of development. For example the Yangtze River Delta has more than 100m people (more than any European country) and GPD(PPP) per capita similar to Italy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze_River_Delta

> Millions of people living in ... Hong Kong... who are well on their way towards western level of development Hong Kong is a developed country. It has a public housing system, a public healthcare system, and amazing transport. It has massive issues with income equality, and particular poverty in old age. However, it doesn't belong in a comparison beside cities in China.

> public housing system, a public healthcare system

These are the sign of a developed country?

Re: China's GDP Growth Pace Was Inflated for Nine Years, Study Finds

#73
post #51
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is ironic that Li Keqiang is premiere (#2) but Xi Jinping has decided not to use his index ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Keqiang_index ) that gets around fudging with more accurate statistics. Li Keqiang Index has three components, electricity consumption, railway cargo volume and bank loans. They all had pretty good growth, e.g. https://www.caixinglobal.com/2018-12-06/china-railway-corp-s... https://www.ca…

I am not sure why you are downvoted, agree with much of it, sort of disagree with > how hard will it be to grow at 6-7% to catch up with some in the middle of nowhere countries with $20k USD GDP per capita? It seems people are now downvoting comments they don't like . You may not like the above comment, but it is hard to argue against it as they are facts. This to me, is a much bigger problem on HN right now. The qua…

Not only that, but people tend to downvote anything that challenges the status quo about states, governments and anything outside of the Western world.

Re: China's GDP Growth Pace Was Inflated for Nine Years, Study Finds

#74
post #69
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is huge and heterogeneous - the coastal cities are well developed and there are 100s of millions of people living in Shanghai, Beijing, Hong-Kong, Shenzhen etc who are well on their way towards western level of development. For example the Yangtze River Delta has more than 100m people (more than any European country) and GPD(PPP) per capita similar to Italy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze_River_Delta

> For example the Yangtze River Delta has more than 100m people (more than any European country) and GPD(PPP) per capita similar to Italy I won't make such comment by completely ignoring the wellbeings of other hundreds million people who live just a couple hours drive from the so called Yangtze River Delta. To name a few examples - Anhui province is so poor to the extent that it is offensive to ask people questions…

which is exactly why trump's trade war is do ridiculous, china is still a developing country, let her enjoy her developing country benefits

Re: China's GDP Growth Pace Was Inflated for Nine Years, Study Finds

#75
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm quite sure it's true, but I can't seem to find the original citation. There were congressional hearings in 2005 because the GSEs couldn't produce financials.

They were, to put it bluntly, fudging their numbers [1]. (From what I can tell, they were releasing timely statements to investors.) This was disclosed by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight and rectified well before the financial crisis. Taken together, it is a bad analogy for the systemic mid-reporting of economic data by China. [1] http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/ofheo200605...

It was not rectified. It is analogous because it was a heavily leveraged lie — lots of policy consequences flowed from it.

It’s not the size of the lie, it’s the degree to which you can leverage it. For policy makers, the best practice is to use plausibly deniable, small, but highly leveraged lies.

Re: China's GDP Growth Pace Was Inflated for Nine Years, Study Finds

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an outside observer, another example would be the constant redefinition of US unemployment (I hear it is now "people who haven't actively sought work for 3 months are no longer considered unemployed") which IIRC from an article has dropped US unemployment figures. It sounds like reality may differ substantially, and there is certainly a huge underground/cash economy.

The US BLS has long kept many different measures of unemployment. All of these numbers are watched to extreme degrees by market participants. The idea that they are constantly redefined doesn’t hold up to basic analysis by anyone who has traded on that data.

[deleted]

Re: China's GDP Growth Pace Was Inflated for Nine Years, Study Finds

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article doesn’t support your original claim at all.

> This article doesn’t support your original claim at all. Could Fannie’s officers really have been accurately disclosing the risks the firm was taking shortly before its sudden collapse? It is here where the case got complicated. While he was chief executive, Mr. Mudd said that subprime mortgages accounted for about 2 percent or less of the mortgages Fannie Mae was insuring. The commission’s case largely rested on t…

The fudging was intended at first to make the books look a bit better and juice the profits.

Then, once it became clear that there was a lot more risk than they had thought, the goal of the fudging became preventing the markets from finding out about the risk, to keep prices high and avoid financial loss.

Re: China's GDP Growth Pace Was Inflated for Nine Years, Study Finds

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Millions of people living in ... Hong Kong... who are well on their way towards western level of development Hong Kong is a developed country. It has a public housing system, a public healthcare system, and amazing transport. It has massive issues with income equality, and particular poverty in old age. However, it doesn't belong in a comparison beside cities in China.

> public housing system, a public healthcare system These are the sign of a developed country?

They're secondary points relating to quality of life and social security that distinguish Hong Kong from China.

Re: China's GDP Growth Pace Was Inflated for Nine Years, Study Finds

#79
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example the Yangtze River Delta has more than 100m people (more than any European country) and GPD(PPP) per capita similar to Italy I won't make such comment by completely ignoring the wellbeings of other hundreds million people who live just a couple hours drive from the so called Yangtze River Delta. To name a few examples - Anhui province is so poor to the extent that it is offensive to ask people questions…

which is exactly why trump's trade war is do ridiculous, china is still a developing country, let her enjoy her developing country benefits

Just because you’re trading with a developing country doesn’t mean you should agree to unfair trade practices.

Re: China's GDP Growth Pace Was Inflated for Nine Years, Study Finds

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> public housing system, a public healthcare system These are the sign of a developed country?

They're secondary points relating to quality of life and social security that distinguish Hong Kong from China.

Well in most Asian cultures taking care of your relatives and elderly is primarily done by the family. Offloading this duty to the state is not a sign of development but a sign of different culture. There are well regarded measures of human development, like the HDI.

"The Human Development Index (HDI) is a statistic composite index of life expectancy, education, and per capita income indicators, which are used to rank countries into four tiers of human development. A country scores a higher HDI when the lifespan is higher, the education level is higher, and the GNI (PPP) per capita is higher. It was developed by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq, with help from Gustav Ranis of Yale University and Lord Meghnad Desai of the London School of Economics, and was further used to measure a country's development by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP)'s Human Development Report Office"

According to Wikipedia China has a HDI of 0.752 which is considered high, 86th position on the list of countries. Hong Kong also has high HDI, 0.933, very high, 7th position.

This comparison is much better than trying to come up with an arbitrary measure.

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