China’s GDP statistics – Comparison with Japan

China’s rapid economic growth has been accompanied by a high level of interest in its GDP and rate of economic growth. This book first surveys the arguments concerning China’s GDP statistics and the retroactive GDP revisions by the National Bureau of Statistics spanning from the 1990s until the present day, and subsequently examines the estimation methods for China’s nominal and real GDP in comparison with Japan. It also discusses imputed rents in detail, which is an important cause of underestimation of China’s GDP and, in particular, the GDP of its tertiary industry, while drawing comparisons with Japan. Finally, the book examines the problem of bias in the single deflation approach, which is mainly used for estimating China’s real GDP. These analyses will be especially useful to economists and professionals in the field, in addition to those interested in the Chinese economy and its GDP statistics.