- October 21, 2022
- Posted by: Stratford Team
- Category: Economy
If you had paid a visit to China’s National Bureau of Statistics in the days following Xi Jinping’s election as general secretary of the Chinese Communist party in 2012, you would have found a cornucopia of economic data.
The number of people employed in the outdoor playground amusement equipment sector, natural gas exports from Guangdong to other provinces, the electricity balance of Inner Mongolia. You name it, they published it, along with more than 80,000 other time series.
But just one year later, those three series and thousands more were no longer updated. Skip to 2016, and more than half of all indicators published by the national and municipal statistics bureaus had been quietly discontinued. The disappearances have been truly remarkable.
Viewed against this backdrop, this week’s decision to indefinitely delay the publication of headline third-quarter indicators, including gross domestic product, looks less like a surprise: it…
