Trung Quốc đang lừa dối thế giới về số liệu lạm phát ?
Thứ năm, 17/02/2011
Tại sao Trung Quốc điều chỉnh cách tính lạm phát đúng vào tháng 1 ? Có phải họ đang cố gắng che giấu về sự thật là lạm phát đang rất cao?
Ngày 15/2, Trung Quốc đă gây bất ngờ với số liệu lạm phát công bố thấp hơn dự báo, trong khi đất nước này đang phải chịu áp lực tăng giá từ nhiều phía. Thị trường bất động sản nóng lên từng ngày, nguồn vốn FDI tăng mạnh 23,4% trong tháng 1, giá cả thực phẩm cũng leo cao.
Nguyên nhân lạm phát của Trung Quốc không cao như dự báo là do Chính phủ Trung Quốc thay đổi các trọng số tính toán lạm phát.
Việc thay đổi trọng số trong cách tính toán CPI của Trung Quốc đă gây ra những nghi ngờ về mức độ tin cậy trong số liệu CPI mà quốc gia này công bố. Một số nghi vấn đặt ra rằng liệu Bắc Kinh có đang cố t́nh t́m cách đánh lừa thế giới?
Trung Quốc đă vượt qua Nhật Bản, trở thành nền kinh tế lớn thứ 2 trên thế giới với số liệu GDP năm ngoái. Những nghi vấn xung quanh chất lượng thông tin và việc liệu có phải Chính phủ đă gian lận thông tin hay không vẫn chưa được xem xét.
Lạm phát của Trung Quốc đang nằm trong tầm kiểm soát của Chính phủ, hay trái lại, nó đang tăng lên cao hơn số liệu công bố ?
Ngày 15/2, theo số liệu mà Trung Quốc công bố, tỷ trọng của chi phí nhà ở trong rổ hàng tiêu dùng sử dụng để tính toán lạm phát đă tăng 4,2 điểm phần trăm. Trung Quốc đă loại bỏ trọng số của một loạt các mặt hàng khác, đặc biệt là thực phẩm, khiến cho CPI giảm tới 2,2 điểm phần trăm so với cách tính cũ.
Ông Jinny Yan, một nhà kinh tế với Ngân hàng Standard Chartered ở Thượng Hải cho biết, việc loại bỏ giá thực phẩm ra khỏi các trọng số tính lạm phát đă làm cho CPI bị đánh giá thấp, v́ như thế nó sẽ không phản ánh đúng thực tế bản chất của CPI.
Vera Yuan, 29 tuổi, một nhà thiết kế quảng cáo tại Thượng Hải đưa ra ư kiến: “Tại sao Chính phủ thực hiện việc điều chỉnh cách tính lạm phát đúng vào tháng 1 vừa qua? Có phải họ đang cố gắng che mắt công chúng về sự thật là lạm phát đang rất cao ?
Cứ 5 năm 1 lần, Cục Thống kê quốc gia của Trung Quốc tiến hành thay đổi phương pháp tính lạm phát. Điều ǵ đứng sau những sự thay đổi phương pháp tính đó ?
Ông Wei Yao, một nhà kinh tế học tại Hồng Kông lại cho rằng: “Đó là cách họ lấy mẫu các dữ liệu và thực hiện các số liệu thống kê. Các thay đổi là phù hợp với sự phát triển của mô h́nh tiêu thụ trong nền kinh tế Trung Quốc”.
Mặc dù đó là mức lạm phát cao nhất kể từ cuối những năm 1990, nhưng là khá thấp đối với một nền kinh tế có mức tăng trưởng khoảng 10% một năm trong một thập kỷ.
Chúng ta chưa thể biết Trung Quốc có thực sự muốn che mắt thế giới về những bất ổn trong nền kinh tế hay không. Nhưng một sự thật là, việc chú trọng vào giá nhà ở, giỏ hàng hóa tính CPI hiện nay đang thiếu sót nhiều các dữ liệu mà theo các nhà kinh tế sẽ làm cho chỉ số lạm phát giảm xuống thấp.
DVT
Theo EconomicTimes
17 Feb, 2011
China's inflation overhaul clouded by data doubts
BEIJING: Like a home renovation that reveals old cracks, China's overhaul of its main inflation gauge has exposed long-standing problems in the reliability of official data. While some suspect that Beijing is intentionally seeking to mislead, the main worry is that the government has been far too slow to keep up with changes sweeping over the economy and so is not painting an accurate picture of the reality on the ground.
With China vaulting past Japan as the world's second-largest economy last year, questions about the quality of its data and whether the government is manipulating it are far from academic. In the confusion about whether Chinese inflation is taking off or, on the contrary, nicely under control, prices of commodities from oil to iron ore and monetary policy decisions in developed and emerging markets alike hang in the balance.
China on Tuesday announced a 4.2 percentage point increase in the share of housing costs in the basket of consumer goods used to measure inflation. It reduced the weightings of a series of other items, notably food, which it cut by 2.2 percentage points.
That hardly solved the problem. “Non-food price inflation is underestimated , not because of the weighting, but because actual prices are not being reflected in the CPI (consumer price index) itself,” said Jinny Yan, an economist with Standard Chartered Bank in Shanghai. According to the official data, annual consumer prices rose 4.9 percent in January. Economists polled by Reuters had expected 5.3 percent.
For ordinary Chinese, something smelled fishy. “Why did the government make the adjustment this particular month?” asked Vera Yuan, 29, an advertising designer in Shanghai. “Are they trying to shift public attention from high inflation?”
The price is wrong
In truth, the timing was not suspicious. Every five years, the National Bureau of Statistics conducts a major revision of the way it measures inflation. What was concerning were its methods. Analysts worried that the agency had fallen behind the curve in the fast-growing Chinese economy and was resistant to subjecting its techniques to the sort of scrutiny that would bring about improvements.
“It is how they sample the data and do the statistics,” said Wei Yao, an economist with Societe Generale in Hong Kong. The new CPI weightings were emblematic of this. On the one hand, the changes were consistent with the evolution of consumption patterns in the Chinese economy.
But by placing extra emphasis on housing, the CPI basket now gives prominence to a deeply flawed set of price data that economists say will make reported inflation too low. The statistics agency uses mortgage rates to extrapolate changes in residential rents. Since housing prices have soared in recent years while borrowing costs have stayed largely flat, that grossly under-estimates housing costs.
Struggling to catch up
The government has also had difficulty in tracking the country's burgeoning services sector, from grey-market lending firms to ubiquitous massage parlours. That has been reflected in regular revisions to growth data. For several years running, the statistics agency has raised its estimates of the size of the Chinese economy, always because its initial measurements missed activity in the services sector.
“If they do improve those methods, not just the weighting, we should see more inflation coming from the non-food sector,” said Yao. China's core inflation rate, stripped of volatile food prices, hit 2.6 percent in the year to January. Although that was the highest since the late 1990s, it was remarkably low for an economy that has enjoyed real growth of about 10 percent a year for a decade. With its re-weightings, Beijing is at least trying to move in the right direction by increasing the focus on non-food prices.
“A small adjustment is better than no adjustment,” said Yi Xianrong, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a vocal critic of the country's CPI calculations . —Reuters China's statisticians struggle to keep pace with economy New CPI places more weight on underestimated prices Lack of transparency hurts credibility of Chinese data
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/...ow/7512641.cms
How Do you Figure Out China’s GDP Figures?
Feb 20, 2011 Last Updated: Feb 21, 2011
It's hard to understand China's GDP numbers. The GDP increase of most provinces beat China's national GDP increase. Economists believe, in addition to the hard-to-solve problem of duplication, the statistical data tweaked for political purpose added
Two pieces of data recently released in China, the national and provincial GDP growth rates, don’t match up.
The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Jan. 20 published economic data for 2010 which showed that the GDP stood at US$5.88 trillion, which is 10.3 percent more than the previous year.
Then, China Economic Net reported on Feb. 16 that that 30 provinces achieved a double-digit GDP growth rate in 2010, and that the rate for 28 provinces was greater than the national rate of 10.3percent.
The two figures don’t square.
There has always been a big disparity between the local and central government reported GDP growth rates.
Since 1985, the central government and local governments started calculating GDP independently. The sum of the GDP of the local governments has always been higher than the total GDP of the nation, and the sum of local cities and counties' remained higher than the total GDP of the province.
NBS explained that the discrepancy is due to the method of calculating the GDP by a statistical system which causes duplication—but some doubt this.
Dr. Cheng Xiaonong, an expert on Chinese economics and politics and former editor-in-chief of Modern China Studies, told The Epoch Times that no other country in the world calculates GDP by province.
“It would be hard to calculate the inflow and outflow between the provinces if GDP is calculated by provinces, thus no individual province can get the exact number. For example, when the Gross Domestic Product of one province gets transported to other provinces it is likely to be counted as the GDP of the other provinces. This is unavoidable and cannot be solved by the government,” he said.
But in China the GDP is a political barometer, determining whether officials are promoted or demoted. Local officials pursue ever higher figures. Even the career of the director of National Bureau of Statistics is tied to the GDP figures, Cheng says.
The result is that a good deal of number massaging goes on. “They don't care if the numbers are real. China is the only country in the world that plays this game,” Cheng said.
“Considering these two factors, China's GDP data can only be a reference, not real. In democratic countries such as the United States, the governor is elected, whereas the governors in China are appointed. Unless China changes its system, this problem of misrepresented GDP will never be solved,” Cheng added.
High-level Chinese Communist Party officials don’t trust the numbers, either.
In the 07Beijing1760 cable released by WikiLeaks on Dec. 4 last year, Li Keqiang, Vice Premier of State Council, joked about how the numbers were fake.
Li was speaking with former U.S. ambassador Clark Randt at a dinner. They discussed China's economic and trade relations, and Li said that the economy cannot be analyzed by the public GDP data.
He pointed out that while the GDP of Liaoning Province in the year 2006 was among the top ten, the number of city dwellers seeking social welfare was one of the highest in the country, and that their net incomes were below the national average. The income of farmers was even less, half that of urban residents.
Cao Yushu, the director of State Planning Commission Policies and Regulations Department, made a similar admission in an interview with the 21st Century Business Herald.
When evaluating economic data, Li Keqiang focused on things like electricity consumption, the volume of rail cargo, and the amount of loans disbursed. Other data, and especially GDP data, is “for reference only,” he said.
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/chin...res-51615.html
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