BEIJING—China's statistics agency said it will stop publishing the country's much-watched official index of national property prices, scrapping a set of data whose accuracy was widely questioned but which also had become a rallying point for public anger over rapidly rising housing prices.
Buildings of the Jianwai SOHO residential and commercial complex in Beijing in January. Reuters
The announcement Wednesday, part of a broader revision of property-price data by the National Bureau of Statistics, fueled already widespread frustration and skepticism about the quality and transparency of economic data in the world's second largest economy. It came just a day after the statistics bureau published a lower-than-expected inflation reading based on a revised formula for the consumer-price index that economists criticized as lacking transparency.
The move is likely to make it harder for executives and investors to gauge national trends in China's property sector, a huge driver of its economic growth and of global demand for steel, cement, and other inputs. The statistics bureau was due to announce its monthly estimate of national property-price changes for January on Friday.
The statistics bureau said it was making the changes to improve the quality of its data. The national property-price index has been criticized for understating the severity of the country's property bubble by diluting the large rises in big cities with tamer changes in smaller ones. It will now publish only separate data for the 70 cities that made up the index, and it will use a new method of calculating property prices that only looks at housing, not commercial property.
Analysts have long complained about flaws in China's official data—a problem common in developing countries—but the issue has taken on added global importance as the Chinese economy has become the world's most important engine of growth in recent years and a major factor in global markets. Last week, the International Energy Agency complained that it was unable to make a reliable forecast for China's oil demand this year because of what it called "huge uncertainties with respect to official data."
Chinese officials have acknowledged the need to improve. Indeed, according to a U.S. diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks, Vice Premier Li Keqiang—widely expected to take over in two years as premier—told the U.S. ambassador in 2007 that China's GDP figures are "man-made" and therefore unreliable."
This week's statistics changes, which come as Chinese consumer and property prices are under intense global scrutiny for signs of inflation and asset-bubble pressures, drew sharp criticism from some analysts.
"It's just like changing the scale of a thermometer, and then telling a patient they no longer need to take medicine for their fever, and the whole family cheers that the illness is cured," Xu Xiaonian, a professor of Economics and Finance at the China-Europe International Business School, said on his personal microblog Wednesday.
Liu Guoning, the news department director at the National Bureau of Statistics, referred questions about criticisms back to the announcement on property data revisions. "We already explained it quite clearly in our news release," he said. "You need to read it carefully."
Arthur Kroeber, managing director at economic research firm GaveKal Dragonomics in Beijing, said he believes much of the criticism of Chinese data, especially from outside China, exaggerates the extent that deliberate falsification is at play. "More of the problems have to do with the fact that China is a large, ungainly, rapidly moving animal that's hard to measure."
Still, he said, people don't trust the numbers because the National Bureau of Statistics "is extremely non-transparent when they make revisions...They just don't tell you what they are doing, or they tell you in a way that raises more questions than it answers." He said the lack of transparency reflects the political culture in China, which is still closed and secretive.
"When these changes come out, there's always this question of whether you feel happy that they are trying to address the problems or whether you feel vexed that they are still leaving so much in chaos."
The bureau's previous property data series relied on information from a survey of transactions, conducted at a local level. Those transactions were meant to be representative, but the series was widely criticized by analysts and the general public for failing to reflect the sharp increases in housing prices in recent years.
Under the new method, the bureau will instead rely on data from online property registries maintained by local authorities, initially in just 35 cities. The remaining cities will continue to use the survey method but will switch over as they develop their own online property registries.
The old index showed that property prices rose 6.4% from a year earlier in December, despite a series of measures by Beijing to clamp down on speculation and rein in prices, including higher down-payment requirements and outright bans on purchases of second and third apartments in some cities. Other private estimates generally show even greater increases in property prices.
Many local observers felt the timing of the changes was just too convenient for Beijing.
"The CPI has had problems for years, it should have been adjusted a long time ago," said Yi Xianrong, a researcher with the Institute of Finance and Banking under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government think tank. "There's so much suspicion of man-made manipulation, with them waiting until [the CPI] is close to 5% to make the adjustments."
On Tuesday, China said the consumer-price index rose by 4.9% from a year earlier in January, and that it had computed the figure using a new set of weightings. The inflation figure came in lower than expected, but the Statistics Bureau said the adjustments only had a small impact, and that the figure would in fact have been even lower under the old weightings.
Among the changes, China increased the weighting of property costs and decreased the weighting of food prices, two changes that had long been called for by private-sector economists.
The bureau gave exact percentage point figures for the degree of change in each of the eight key weightings. The problem was that it never publicly disclosed the previous weightings for six of the eight components, so even knowing the change, private analysts still couldn't say exactly what the new or old weightings were. Economists at multiple investment banks said they were unsure how to check the bureau's calculations.
Eliot Gao in Beijing contributed to this article.
©online.wsj.com
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.