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Statistics, North Korea and the "L"

  • Published 28 May 2009

Hopes of a rebound in GDP growth in Q2 fade, but much rides on the outlook for real estate.

"I have noticed that nothing I never said ever did me any harm." Calvin Coolidge could stay quiet. But the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) doesn't have that option. Its officials, so often lambasted for inconsistencies and errors, must spin the best explanations they can conjour from the raw data forwarded to them by local government offices all over the country. If they are often wide of the mark, that is partly down to the pyramidal structure of China's broad-based bureaucracy. Nationwide, there are some 33m public employees (excluding the military and state-owned enterprise workers), but only 2m of these sit at the central level and a mere 50,000 are employed within core central government agencies. This means that the local tail often wags the central dog.

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