Is China’s GDP really only 6 percent?
China’s booming economic growth may not be all it seems. In Sunday’s New York Times, Lester Thurow argues China’s official economic statistics are not to be believed and there is simply no way its economy will catch the United States before the end of the century. Thurow, a professor of management and economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, questions China’s official Chinese growth statistics, calling them implausible and at best, an approximate growth rates of the economy of China cities. First, let’s deal with the implausibility of the official Chinese statistics. Mathematically, if the overall economy were to grow 10 percent annually, and the 70 percent of the economy that is based in rural areas were not growing (as stated by the Chinese government), the economy in China’s cities would have to be growing by 33 percent a year. The urban economy is growing rapidly, but not at a 33 percent pace. Thurow uses electrical consumption to gage China’s actual growth. Economic
