China says provinces cook up GDP figures

China, which uses its GDP figures as a political tool to impress its citizens and the world at large, said over the weekend that its provincial governments may be rigging their growth statistics figures to show how capable they are of managing their local economies.

Media commentators say, this rigging, may also have inflated the country's GDP figures.

They also say that in the absence of independently verifiable information, it is likely that the country's production, power consumption, retail sales, unemployment rate figures, too may have been inaccuracy because of the paranoia of putting out low figures leading to loss of face for the provincial administrators.

Speaking at a national statistics work conference in Beijing on 28 January, Ma Jiantang, commissioner of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said that the nation's statistical credibility has been affected since some provincial officials inflate the GDP figures they report to the NBS.

The China Daily online said in a report on Saturday, subsequently pulled, that the aggregate of the GDP figures reported by local governments reportedly is often larger than the overall national figure released by the NBS, which has raised concerns that the local governments may have rigged the statistics to please their bosses in Beijing.

According to the NBS, for the first half of 2009, the GDP figures given by the provincial governments far exceeded the national GDP figure calculated by the NBS, by more than 1.4 trillion yuan, or about 10 per cent of the total GDP.