China’s Economic Numbers Have a Credibility Problem

China’s gross domestic product grew 6.8 percent in the first quarter, smack on its pace in the preceding quarter, which was unchanged from the quarter before that. It’s a well-established pattern: Since 2015, China’s quarterly growth figures haven’t varied by more than 0.1 percentage point on a year-on-year basis. That contrasts with the U.S., where swings of a full percentage point from quarter to quarter aren’t uncommon.

Getting an accurate read on the world’s second-largest economy has never been more important. China supplied around one-third of global growth in 2017, up from 18 percent in 2007, according to Bloomberg calculations. That means an economist working at the Reserve Bank of Australia in Sydney and a number cruncher in the sales department at Vale SA, the giant iron ore exporter based in Rio de Janeiro, both need Chinese data to help generate their forecasts. And with officials in Beijing promising to open the nation’s financial markets to the outside world, the ranks of investors who rely on this information are bound to grow.