As you know, China’s GDP accounting and its rather consistent upward revisions in GDP estimates have been somewhat controversial. For a brief time in 2008-2009 China had forecast slower growth rates year-over-year, but this has now reversed, in part as a result of a very stimulative monetary policy. So the good news is that, even if China has cooked its books a bit, the upward trend is back. Bloomberg:

China raised its 2008 growth estimate to 9.6 percent from 9 percent and said this year’s quarterly figures will increase, narrowing the gap with Japan, the world’s second-biggest economy.

Gross domestic product was 31.405 trillion yuan ($4.6 trillion) last year, the statistics bureau said at a briefing in Beijing today. That compares with a previous 30.067 trillion yuan and the World Bank’s estimate of $4.9 trillion for Japan…China’s expansion in 2008 compares with U.S. growth of less than 1 percent. Japan’s gross domestic product shrank 1.2 percent. The Indian economy expanded 6.7 percent in the fiscal year ended March 2009.

This year, the Chinese economy grew 8.9 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier, 7.9 percent in the second and 6.1 percent in the first. The government has pledged to maintain a “moderately loose” monetary policy in 2010 to sustain a rebound driven by a stimulus package and record lending.

The pace of growth is attracting more investment. Foreign direct investment climbed 32 percent in November to $7 billion from a year earlier. Luxury carmaker Bayerische Motoren Werke AG said last month that it will build a new factory worth 5 billion yuan in China to tap an auto market set to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest…

Today’s figures showed a 13.1 trillion yuan contribution from services in 2008, compared with 12 trillion yuan previously. The census, intended to give a better picture of the economy’s make-up, focused on industry and services rather than agriculture…

Gross domestic product figures for 2005, 2006 and 2007 will also be revised as a result of the census, Peng said. China’s economy was 4.4 percent bigger in 2008 than originally estimated, today’s figures showed. In comparison, a previous census in 2005 showed the statistics bureau had under-estimated the size of the 2004 economy by 17 percent.

Once upon a time we worried about the quality of China’s financial reporting and its banking policies, but no longer. Their policies look pretty reasonable, at least in comparison to a United States that is rushing headlong to being utterly dependent on the rest of the world — for handouts in amounts so large it does not appear possible that they can be financed.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 27th, 2009 at 2:07 pm and is filed under China, Democrats, General, Republicans, business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.