Challenges of working with the Chinese NBS firm-level data

Loren Brandt (loren.brandt@utoronto.ca), Johannes Van Biesebroeck and Yifan Zhang

China Economic Review, 2014, vol. 30, issue C, 339-352

Abstract: Over the reform period, industry has been the source of 40% of GDP, and has contributed 90% of China's exports. Annual firm-level surveys that begin in 1992, complemented with industry-wide census in 1995, 2004 and 2008, are rich sources of data on firm behavior. It is well-known that working with Chinese data requires overcoming difficult measurement issues. Macroeconomic series, for example, are often suspected of suffering from reporting bias and political interference. Working with the firm-level data has its own challenges. In this paper, we provide an introduction to these data sets. We discuss and illustrate several of the issues that make comparability over time difficult and suggest solutions. The importance of a particular measurement issue often depends on the exact application. We illustrate this point by tracing the evolution of the relative productivity level of entrants and incumbents over time, distinguishing between changes in actual performance and changes driven by measurement problems. We conclude by identifying a few promising areas of future research and margins on which collaboration among users to improve these data might be beneficial.

Keywords: Administrative data; Measurement; Firm entry; Manufacturing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (137)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1043951X14000340
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Challenges of working with the Chinese NBS firm-level data (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chieco:v:30:y:2014:i:c:p:339-352

DOI: 10.1016/j.chieco.2014.04.008

Access Statistics for this article

China Economic Review is currently edited by B.M. Fleisher, K. X. D. Huang, M.E. Lovely, Y. Wen, X. Zhang and X. Zhu

More articles in China Economic Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).