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Can We Trust These China Numbers?

China's latest GDP figures were reassuring. But should we believe them...?

MUCH TO everyone's relief – if to few people's real surprise – the official Chinese numbers for the fourth quarter 'improved' from the previous trimesters' mini-slough, with GDP accelerating from 7.4% year-on-year to 7.9% and industrial production ending the year at a 10.3% rate which was the fastest in nine months, writes Sean Corrigan for the Cobden Centre.

As usual, these data came with any number of attached caveats. Was it really possible, for example, that heavy industry grew at just under 10% in 2012 as a whole, while only using 3.8% more electrical power? Could this be done while rail freight actually dipped by 1.5% over the year or container traffic at the nation's two biggest ports of Shanghai and Shenzhen only managed a combined 2.1% increase?

It does seem a touch problematical, doesn't it?

Then again, what we do know is that both fiscal outlays and credit provision grew markedly in the final quarter. Nevertheless, what we must look askance at is what supposedly resulted – the credibility-stretching 22% gain in profit and 15.6% jump in revenues (neither figure annualized) enjoyed by the state-owned enterprises between the last three months of the year and the prior three. In Yuan terms, we are asked to accept that QIV's increment to revenues was the greatest on record; that to its profits, one not beaten since the first half of 2009 when the economy was roaring out of the post-Lehman slump.

What is also noticeable is that gross urban fixed asset investment for the year amounted to a massive Y34 trillion which, while computed on a different basis from the GFCF component of the number, represents a record high 70% of GDP. Moreover, the marginal extra UFAI undertaken in 2012 versus 2011 amounted to Y6.3 trillion (or +21%), which was a cool 136% of the Y4.9 trillion in declared extra nominal GDP (+9.8%), a surproportion only previously in evidence during the great reflation between June'09-June'10 – an episode to which much official hand-wringing has been devoted for having sown many of the troubles of misplaced investment and widespread speculation which so plagues the economy today.

Furthermore, the past twelve months' cumulative CNY1.46 trillion positive trade balance was the largest since September 2009 and its YOY growth of CNY440 billion accounted for almost 10% of incremental GDP, the largest such contribution since 2007 despite the intent to focus henceforth on domestic, not foreign, sources of growth.

So, even if we take the Chinese numbers at face value (and all we have to say here is 'Caterpillar'), the much vaunted 'rebalancing' would seem to have been postponed, once again, for reasons of short-term political expediency.

Any more confident analysis of China is being complicated by the fact that not only are the various institutions which comprise its leadership giving off conflicting signals – not least the obvious clash between the schedule of eye-wateringly expensive infrastructure schemes and the financial authorities' moves to limit local governmental abuse of Off Balance Sheet platforms – but it is almost certain that we must wait until the formal handover of power in March for any major new policy initiatives to be given a more concrete form.

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Stalwart economist of the anti-government Austrian school, Sean Corrigan has been thumbing his nose at the crowd ever since he sold Sterling for a profit as the ERM collapsed in autumn 1992. Former City correspondent for The Daily Reckoning, a frequent contributor to the widely-respected Ludwig von Mises and Cobden Centre websites, and a regular guest on CNBC, Mr.Corrigan is a consultant at Hinde Capital, writing their Macro Letter.

See the full archive of Sean Corrigan articles.
 

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