Hey /liberty/,
Chinese Economic Data Suspicion thread.
I was looking through Chinese trade data to do the following experiment:
A-Take exports of China
B-Go to each country's imports, check their imports from China
Due to entrepot trading, what China says it exports to A may not be what A says it imports from China, however, the totals should add up. And they do, except:
- There is a large number of Hong Kong exports for which I do not know where they are going.
- China stands alone in World Bank data in…having $160 billion in imports from…itself.
- Chinese<->Hong Kong trade looks really fucking suspicious.
Play around with it yourself:
http://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/CHN
I'm betting there's some weird way this stuff is calculated to account for this, though.