Probably far less than it is. Number sheets coming from any non easily verifiable, complicated reporting made in China are an estimate in the favor of the reporter. Cheating one another and especially the system is a national sport.
What a fucking racist sinophobic thing to say after the North Atlantic has experienced the LIBOR scandal, the Madoff scandal, the Enron scandal, the 2008 subprime scandal, the Theranos scandal, the FTX scandal, the Volkswagen Dieselgate scandal, the drug money laundering scandal, the WorldCom scandal, the Wirecard scandal, the Hurricane Katrina fraud, the multiple COVID profiteering fraud, the revelations in the Panama Paper, the revelations in the Swiss Leaks, the revelations in the Paradise Papers, the revelations in the Bahamas Leaks, the revelations in the FinCEN files, the revelations in the Pandora Papers, the revelations in the Suisse Secrets, the Qatargate scandal, the WeWork scandal, the Jack Abramoff scandals, the kids-for-cash scandal…
And this doesn’t even get into the bog standard behavior of market manipulation by hedge funds, the theft of property from citizens by police rivaling and sometimes exceeding the annual theft of property by criminals, the billions in annual wage theft, the behavior of the North Atlantic multi-national oil companies, the behavior of the North Atlantic coal companies, the behavior of the North Atlantic weapons manufactures, the behavior of the North Atlantic war-chasing reconstruction consultants, the behavior of American monopolists, the insider trading of American politicians, the billions in legal bribery we call lobbying, Forbes literally writing an article that it was impossible to keep up with all the corporate accounting scandals so they tried to make a running list and just stopped updating it in 2002.
You do realize that there is a financial sector that invests both domestically and internationally? If literally everything was unreliable, it would be nigh impossible for investors to turn a profit.
Not every sector of the economy is questionable, but where data heavily overall metrics like GDP, there have been well-documented issues of data integrity. For example, population counts.
The “discrepancies” you refer in this state-sponsored research paper published by a hostile, violent, authoritarian, genocidal, regressive, and oppressive regime that has held power in its country for decades is hardly to be trusted at face value. This authoritarian country has a cultural history of lying, cheating, and manipulating the truth for their own personal and racist objectives. It’ll take a long time before a country like that will be civilized enough to be trustworthy. That said, if you actually READ the report, it talks about primarily logistical issues, 2 political events (GLF and Tienanmen) that have absolutely nothing to do with the trustworthiness of the their data but rather are quite literally propagandistic elements to make the reader BELIEVE that Chinese reporting is somehow more untrustworthy than the author’s of the paper when when the number of examples of falsified data coming out of their own country could fill multiple volumes.
Meanwhile, most of the report is about potential discrepancies, not actual discrepancies, with very few examples peppered throughout to make it seem like they’re saying more than they are.
At the same time, China literally publishes five-year plans, executes on them, reports on them every year, then publishes new five-year plans. How much more transparent than literally every other nation on the planet could China be before you admit you’re wrong? Do they need to build a massive surveillance project and ghettoize all of their lumpen so they can get you accurate population counts like the North Atlantic countries do?
Nope. Why are those specific metrics more important than 5-year plans? What makes it “more transparent” instead of simply “more accurate”? Who are the publications for? Private investors trying to make a profit? Is it possible that China isn’t willing to put as much effort into reporting for that purpose? Why can’t the US, UK, and Australia publish 5-year plans?
Why are those specific metrics more important than 5-year plans?
Because a plan is just an intention or wishful thinking. Inflation data is an actual, measurable result.
Inflation data is one of the most common economic measurements and it can be reasonably expected that every country should be able to not only report on the inflation metric itself, but provide details on the measurement and the methodology used so that every country, globally, knows that the metric reported by each country is transparent and credible. Understanding the methodology then allows analysts to investigate the underlying drivers of the inflation result, confirm its accuracy, and compare it between countries by using similar methodologies.
Simply put, if a country can't provide detailed explanations on how they determine an important metric like inflation, then what does that suggest about other metrics or results that they share?
Inflation is pretty fraught. No one seems to have a good grip on what to do with it. There’s multiple ways for every country to measure inflation, most them have to do with the prices of specific categories of goods. How does that work when most of the goods used for an index are price controlled? How do you measure such a thing when prices are driven by both market dynamics and public policy?
Harping on inflation is sort of like saying China should be paying attention to yardage gains on the gridiron while they’re busy playing baseball. China is playing a fundamentally different game than the North Atlantic. Part of that game is trapping capitalists by incentivizing them to invest without it being in the capitalists’ long term interest. Of course there’s going to be a difference between Chinese financial reporting and European - China is trying to undermine the European world order using European money freely given by Europeans (and their settler descendants).
That doesn’t mean they are fudging numbers and completely incapable of getting accurate information. It just means their focus is different and they’ll only put in the effort they have to in order to attract investment. The rest of their efforts are going towards building and executing 5-year plans that actually contribute to their society and preventing the North Atlantic from infiltrating, invading, starving or nuking them.
But yeah, ok. They could report inflation numbers better. Why don’t you go talk to people who moved their businesses to China or invest billions in China and see if they think your complaint matches their reality. Until then, you’re literally picking at nits.
Also, the 5-year plans are tracked and reported on. They are consistently delivered on. When there is variance that variance is analyzed and the learnings are incorporated into future plans. They’ve been doing this for decades. It’s not wishful thinking.
Most of those grains were going to Africa which Russia pretents to be best friends with, so I’m not sure how they showed progressive West anything really.
My opinion about this whole situation and the war against Russia, and the relationship of Europe and the United States to us, can be described in the words of the book War of the Worlds : Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
I am getting a bit sick and tired of American religious groups spreading hatred around the world. Also, how sad that they basically associated “family” in the name of any group or law with “must be by (by) a hate group” in my mind.
The most annoying thing isn’t even the religious extremists, it is all the religious moderates who go around claiming that religion isn’t the problem before turning around and supporting the extremists by giving them the power to implement their vile agendas.
According to the National Weather service, much of the northeastern United States will remain under a flood watch until Tuesday evening.
And yet, not a single recommendation in the article on how to avoid being caught up in flash floods, what causes them, what are first signs, how to behave when caught in one,… I know it is the BBC so probably not the primary news source for that part of the US but still, that would have been the easiest way to save lives in similar situations
bbc.co.uk
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