China Turns to Well-Honed Playbook: Cut Rates, Hide Data

livemint.com:

consumer spending, industrial production and public and private investment in China missed expectations by a wide margin in July, data showed Tuesday, adding to a drumbeat of bad news on the economy. At the same time, China’s statistics bureau announced it would suspend publication of data on youth unemployment in China, citing plans to revisit the methodology.

For investors and economists, the abrupt suspension fits a worrying pattern of increasing haziness around key aspects of China’s economy. They warn that Beijing’s moves to stifle the flow of information may further depress already fragile confidence and undermine China’s appeal as a destination for investment—just when Beijing is talking up the importance of attracting foreign capital.

“Whether Chinese officials publish the youth jobless data or not doesn’t change people’s perceptions on the ground," said Shen Meng, director at Chanson & Co., a Beijing-based boutique investment bank. “Withholding the data will only aggravate the market’s concerns about the health of the economy." Chinese authorities have made it more difficult for foreign institutions to access certain economic and financial data in recent months, including corporate-registration information, patents and certain statistics.

In October, China’s statistics bureau abruptly halted the release of quarterly gross domestic product data just hours before it was set to be published, without providing an explanation. Days earlier, against the backdrop of the Communist Party’s twice-a-decade congress, it simply didn’t release monthly official trade data.