China’s Central Bank: correlation between energy usage and GDP diverge in latest numbers.
// June 6th, 2009 // No Comments » // Economics
Interesting to note Paul Krugman’s point on recent Chinese central bank figures (if you follow this sort of stuff). Excerpted verbatim from here his blog at the New York Times online.
May 29, 2009
What you don’t know …
The focus these days is on the mismatch between China’s electricity consumption and a key measure of industrial output.
For most of the past decade, China’s industrial value-added growth (IVA) –industry output less input costs – has moved broadly in step with movements in electricity consumption. But the relationship’s broken down recently: electricity use is still seeing negative growth, while IVA is growing at a decent positive rate again.
Some China analysts are crying foul: If IVA growth figures are being cooked, surely that means China’s recent GDP data have been overstated too. China’s statisticians use IVA output to estimate what accounts for nearly half of China’s GDP.
China’s association of electricity generators has a solution: it’s stopped publishing consumption data.
Here is the best comment out of about 30:
“solution: it’s stopped publishing consumption data” Well, it seems many government share the same play book. You can stop providing information to the public (for their own good) or, just change to rules. Ahh …. could we think of another governing body that might have used these tactics? Let’s think real hard. — Miffed
Alwin’s thought bubble: … Fed M3 is not published.. just too scary for our eyes.
Related: here is Deloitte’s Asia Pacfic outlook for June 2009