Skip to main content

China’s official growth figures are bad enough to be believed from TheEconomist

By KESLS RAM
China's official growth figures are bad enough to be believed from TheEconomist

When he was himself a local official in the north-eastern province of Liaoning, Mr Li sought the truth about the provincial economy from three facts in particular: the electricity it consumed, the cargo travelling on its railways and the amount of loans disbursed by its banks. These indicators, he felt, were more reliable than the official gdp figures. In a similar spirit, John Fernald, Eric Hsu and Mark Spiegel of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco have shown that a judicious combination of eight alternative indicators (including electricity consumption, rail cargo, retail sales and consumer expectations) does a reasonably good job of tracking China's economic ups and downs. Seven of these indicators (all except consumer confidence) have already been updated for the three months from April to June. They can therefore be used to cross-check the latest official growth figure.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2022/07/28/chinas-official-growth-figures-are-bad-enough-to-be-believed

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

AI sceptic Emily Bender: ‘The emperor has no clothes’

By KESLS RAM
Her thesis is that the whizzy chatbots and image-generation tools created by OpenAI and rivals Anthropic, Elon Musk's xAI, Google and Meta are little more than "stochastic parrots", a term that she coined in a 2021 paper. A stochastic parrot, she wrote, is a system "for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning". https://on.ft.com/465EHFT I saw this article when using the Financial Times app and thought you might be interested: Financial Times, AI sceptic Emily Bender: 'The emperor has no clothes' -- George Hammond -- Read the full article at:
Post a Comment
Read more

Asian Water

By KESLS RAM
Institutions matter for service delivery Public water sector institutions in many developing countries have inherited archaic policies that are ineffective. A change in mindset is imperative to revive decaying water utilities.   By K.E. Seetharam   At the Fourth World Water Forum in Mexico in March 2006, the Asian Development Bank was one of the few institutions to raise the flag on the need for good governance in the water sector. Although policy aspects are important for development, ADB's concept of good governance focuses on the effective management of water infrastructure to ensure proper delivery of services.   In essence, good governance is about changing attitudes and behaviour to ensure that water sector institutions actually deliver to their citizens what they say they will deliver. Institutions have two dimensions—the policies, and the persons who are responsible for implementing them. A basic issue that arises in relation to good governance is how well the governm...
Post a Comment
Read more

Drinking Water is Food

By KESLS RAM
Drinking Water is Like Food— bottle it and deliver it to the poor immediately   K E Seetharam   The Asia Water Watch 2015 , commissioned by ADB, WHO, UNDP, and UNESCAP, estimates that another 700 million people—at minimum—will need to be served in Asia over the next decade to meet Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target 10 on safe drinking water alone. When I started to coordinate the preparation of report in 2005, the big question that I had in my mind was how can this massive target be achieved expeditiously? Developing country governments and development organizations are attempting to partly answer this question. In early 2006, I assisted ADB in announcing its Water Financing Program 2006-2010. The Program, one of the most concrete actions publicly announced so far by international organizations, will double ADB's investments in the water sector to over $2 billion annually for the next five years. But typical development projects take at least 3 to 5 five years for their ...
Post a Comment
Read more