China's Growth Numbers May Finally Add Up... in 2019
- NBS chief economist Sheng Laiyun comments in a rare interview
- China has enough assets to balance risk from debt, Sheng says
Looking down at the modern and booming city of Guiyang, the capital of China's remote Guizhou Province. Guiyang is not only the capital city of the Guizhou Province, it is also the economic and commercial hub.
Photographer: Ryan Pyle/Corbis via Getty ImagesThis article is for subscribers only.
For local officials in China’s provinces keen to boost their chances of promotion, the days of being able to puff up the output data they send to Beijing may be coming to an end.
Fifteen years ago, if you added up the gross domestic product of all China’s 31 provinces, you’d get a number more than 10 percent larger than the official national total. By around 2019, the country will "nearly eliminate" that gap, according to Sheng Laiyun, chief economist of the National Bureau of Statistics.