Is China’s Data Manipulated, or Flawed? Maybe Both

livemint.com:

unemployment rate for China’s youth reached an all time record of 21.3% in June. China’s National Bureau of Statistics responded by ceasing publication of the rate. The move calls attention to the lengths to which Beijing will go to suppress unflattering information, in this case the economic distress facing China’s young people.

Yet burying the data doesn’t fix the problem; it doesn’t even hide it. Rather, it reveals something endemic to autocratic societies: an inability, or unwillingness, to produce genuinely accurate and unbiased statistics. Tuesday’s decision to suspend reporting the unemployment rate for people ages 16 to 24, which the government attributed to issues over how to treat students looking for work, is part of a pattern: Beijing drops a data series, often quietly, citing poor data quality, then waits until everyone forgets.

“The National Bureau of Statistics has a history of discontinuing important data series," Carsten Holz, a professor at Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, said via email. “The NBS mission is not to serve the public, but the Chinese Communist Party. Any order from the Party to obfuscate the derivation of the official GDP [gross domestic product] statistics or to discontinue unfavorable unemployment statistics would take precedence over professional statistics practices." China has undertaken a mix of policies to address youth unemployment, from allowing street vendors, to hiring more national and provincial civil servants.

Cutting the data makes it harder to know if these efforts are working. Private firms help fill the data void Nor will it hide the unhappiness of young people. Despite China’s tight grip on information, private firms conduct regular polling of China.