Another assessment of China's GDP accuracy

Business Insider has published an analysis strongly suggesting that China is overstating its GDP growth, because its reported declines in imports, manufacturing, and investment (whether absolute decline or decline in growth) are too strongly decoupled from the overall GDP growth figure when compared against the lack of such decoupling in OECD economies (US, UK, Europe, and Japan).

However, a key paragraph is the following (my emphasis):

While there are considerable differences between China’s economy compared to other major OECD nations – the stage of economic development just for starters – the evidence uncovered by Artus suggests, in his opinion, that the government is overstating the true growth level of the economy.

Just one scratch below the surface, and this whole comparison between China and advanced OECD economies is completely unwarranted. $8,000 per capita GDP simply can't be compared to $40,000 or $50,000, can it? Might as well compare $8,000 to $4,000 or $5,000: in other words, between China now and China in 2011 or 2012, before its massive rebalancing began in earnest.

Let's take imports: they have been consistently down by double-digit percentages year-on-year, and a staggering 15 to 20 percent in recent months. But that's because of the crash - up to 50 percent in dollar terms - in commodity prices. No comparison with an economy like the US makes any sense.

Meanwhile, according to Bloomberg, despite a slowdown in 3Q, fixed asset investment growth is still up 10.3 percent on year through September (down rather slightly from 11.4 in 1H). This isn't anything remotely approaching a crash; neither is the slowdown of industrial production to 5.7 percent.

So the bears will always have their talking points; they'd just be a lot more credible if their assessments weren't so chronically full of holes, even if the official data is itself as patchy as they claim.