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Now, none of this actually proves China is cooking the books. And some will point out, rightly, that a command economy like China’s shouldn’t be expected to behave the same way as Western ones do. After all, the government can ramp up economic activity pretty much when and how it chooses — no time-consuming political debate necessary. If its goal is simply to meet a target, it doesn’t have to fudge the numbers: it can just turn on the stimulus taps.

Still, that doesn’t address the unreliability of the input data. To be fair, the Chinese statistics bureau is well aware of the issue, so in calculating national GDP it applies a discount to the locally provided data. Yet various outside analysts have come up with a plethora of ways to get a more accurate read on the Chinese economy based on more verifiable data. Among the most popular is the Li Keqiang index, so named because the Chinese premier himself, in 2007, reportedly expressed skepticism about the government numbers and told a U.S. official that he looked at only three indicators: growth in bank loans, electricity consumption and rail freight.

Others look at some combination of some of those factors along with retail sales, agriculture, industrial output, and even luminosity — a reading of night lights derived by satellite imagery.

One of the more comprehensive alternative looks at the real state of the Chinese economy was released this month, in a study authored by researcher Wei Chen, Xilu Chen and Zheng Song of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Chang-Tai Hsieh of the University of Chicago. In it, the authors looked at nominal GDP, thereby avoiding the fuzziness over inflation rates, and among other indicators compare official GDP data with economic activity implied by China’s value-added tax — which, thanks to a government crackdown on tax avoidance, the researchers consider fairly reliable. They found evidence that the NSB has, since 2008, not been making big enough adjustments to locally provided data, but their biggest bombshell was this: “Relative to the official numbers, we estimate that GDP growth from 2008-2016 is 1.7 percentage points lower.” That’s kind of a big deal — and would mean that nominal GDP in China, officially more than US$13 trillion, is actually nearly 20 per cent smaller, according to calculations by the South China Morning Post.