Has an upper middle income

Disputes over economic

There exists disputes over reliability of official economic data. Foreign and some Chinese sources have claimed that official Chinese government statistics overstate China's economic growth.[123] However, several Western academics and institutions have stated that China's economic growth is higher than indicated by official figures.[124] Others, such as the Economist Intelligence Unit, state that while there's evidence China's GDP data is "smoothed", they believe that China's nominal and real GDP data are broadly accurate.

OverestimatingEdit

Chinese provinces and cities have long been suspected of cooking their numbers, with the focus on local government officials, whose performance are often assessed based on how well their respective economies have performed.[126] In recent years, China claimed growth numbers have come under increased scrutiny, with both domestic and international observers alleging the government has been inflating its economic output.[123][127]
A 2015 survey by The Wall Street Journal of 64 select economists found that 96% of respondents think China's GDP estimates don't "accurately reflect the state of the Chinese economy."[128] However, more than half the economists in the survey estimated that China's annual growth was somewhere in the 5% to 7% range, which represents robust growth. Chinese premier Li Keqiang has said he is far from confident in the country's GDP estimates, calling them "man-made" and unreliable, according to a leaked document from 2007 obtained by WikiLeaks. He said government data releases, especially the GDP numbers, should be used "for reference only".[129]
Analysts like Wilbur Ross and Donald Straszheim believe China's recent economic growth has been overstated, and estimate a growth rate at around 4% or less.[130] According to Chang-Tai Hsieh, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Michael Zheng Song, an economics professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and coauthors, China's economy was smaller than what the Chinese government stated in 2016. In their research paper, published by the Brookings Institution, they adjusted the historical GDP time series using value-added tax data, which they said are "highly resistant to fraud and tampering".[131][132] They found that China's economic growth may have been overstated by 1.7 percent each year between 2008 and 2016, meaning that the government may have been overstating the size of the Chinese economy by 12–16 percent in 2016.