Since the 1998 "wind of falsification and embellishment," Chinese official GDP statistics have repeatedly come under scrutiny. This paper evaluates the quality of China's GDP statistics in four stages. First, it reviews past and ongoing suspicions of the quality of GDP data and examines the...

Investment statistics of the People's Republic of China are a source of many puzzles. Some investment data are of dubious quality, while the particular concepts of investment and their changing definitions over time are often poorly understood. Fixed asset investment, a remnant of the planned...

Economic development of a remote, mountainous region is a challenge for any country. This paper examines how this development challenge has been addressed in a high-altitude backward region of the People's Republic of China. Is this region increasingly being left behind or has it entered a...

Industrial policies are widely credited with upgrading the economic structure of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and advancing its economy towards and beyond the current technological frontier. Yet the data suggest that the PRC's economy-wide investment patterns—with investment embodying...

Industrial policies are widely credited with upgrading the economic structure of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and advancing its economy towards and beyond the current technological frontier. Yet the data suggest that the PRC's economy-wide investment patterns—with investment embodying...

Investment statistics of the People's Republic of China are a source of many puzzles. Some investment data are of dubious quality, while the particular concepts of investment and their changing definitions over time are often poorly understood. Fixed asset investment, a remnant of the planned...

This paper has two objectives. (i) Assess the availability and the quality of the data series necessary to construct productivity measures for the Chinese economy. (ii) Produce a set of productivity statistics that can be integrated into the existing set of OECD productivity indicators and that...

Alwyn Young (2000) provided evidence for distortions begetting distortions in a partially reformed economy by examining barriers to inter-provincial trade in China. His findings of increasing barriers to inter-provincial trade are based on five arguments. This paper critically examines each of...

Until the late 1990s, the rapid development of rural cooperative funds as semi-formal financial institutions in the countryside attracted little attention. In many provinces, these funds took over large swathes of rural finance, before the State Council in March 1999 issued a secret decree...