China’s already poor reputation on statistics takes another beating

livemint.com:

asserted somewhat prematurely that the Chinese economic miracle was drawing to a close. The National Bureau of Statistics had started publishing the monthly youth unemployment rate in 2018 to align itself with international standards. But experts have pointed out that it may have been underestimating the actual youth joblessness rate.

The international norm, followed by the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), is to use the 15-24 age range when calculating youth unemployment. Beijing, however, only counts those aged 16-24. China does not enjoy a good reputation for the quality of its official statistics, and halting the publishing of youth unemployment data does nothing to improve it.

Earlier this year, the bureau had come in for sharp criticism after it halted the public release of monthly readings of consumer confidence after March, discontinuing a series it had launched 33 years ago. The surveys of consumer confidence, a closely followed barometer of Chinese households’ willingness to spend, had dived during the covid lockdowns in spring of 2022. It recovered briefly in the early months of this year after the government lifted lockdowns last December, only to drop again, leading to the suspension of its public release.

Through the pandemic too, Chinese authorities were constantly under fire, including from international agencies such as the World Health Organisation which suspected they were underreporting the true infection and casualty numbers. China’s economic problems are severe. Besides legacy structural issues, its resilience was tested by the government’s draconian zero-covid policy.