China's GDP Growth May be Understated

Hunter Clark, Maxim Pinkovskiy and Xavier Sala-i-Martin

No 23323, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Concerns about the quality of China’s official GDP statistics have been a perennial question in understanding its economic dynamics. We use data on satellite-recorded nighttime lights as an independent benchmark for comparing various published indicators of the state of the Chinese economy. Using the methodology of Pinkovskiy and Sala-i-Martin (2016a and b), we exploit nighttime lights to compute the optimal weights for various Chinese economic indicators in a best unbiased predictor of Chinese growth rates. Our computations of Chinese growth based on optimal weightings of various combinations of economic indicators provide evidence against the hypothesis that the Chinese economy contracted precipitously in late 2015, and are consistent with the rate of Chinese growth being higher than is reported in the official statistics.

JEL-codes: F0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-gro and nep-tra
Note: EFG
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Published as Hunter Clark & Maxim Pinkovskiy & Xavier Sala-i-Martin, 2018. "China's GDP growth may be understated," China Economic Review, .

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Journal Article: China's GDP growth may be understated (2020)
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