Justin Fox, Columnist

China Can't Kick Habit of Worshiping GDP

The unnaturally smooth growth numbers raise suspicions.

October 28, 2015 at 3:58 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Bet he knows the truth.
Source: Chesnot/Getty Images

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China's target for economic growth is 7 percent a year. And whaddya know: the National Bureau of Statistics of China reported earlier this month that the country’s gross domestic product in the third quarter was 6.9 percent higher than a year before. That’s after growing 7 percent in the second quarter and 7 percent in the first.

A lot of observers are understandably skeptical of these near-perfect numbers, and make their own estimates of Chinese GDP. Tom Orlik, the chief Asia economist for Bloomberg Intelligence, has compiled a roundup of outside takes on what third-quarter GDP growth in China really looked like: