Jake's View | Don't panic about slowing growth, Beijing - just go bottom-up
If the party really wants to maintain strong GDP data, all it has to do is bundle together local growth rates to magically produce a higher pace
Mainland GDP forecast to hit 24-year low
What makes 7 per cent so bad? Only once in the past 50 years has the United States achieved a growth rate so high in annual gross domestic product. I think Britain may have done it once in the 1920s but certainly not since the second world war.
The World Bank does, however, list some countries with more than 7 per cent growth last year. Under "C", along with China, we have Ivory Coast at 8.7 per cent, Democratic Republic of Congo at 8.5 and Cambodia at 7.5. Great company. With whom would you rather match yourself, Mr Xi?
But if we abandon the Marxist notion that democracy is superfluous as the Communist Party is already the party of the people, and I believe Beijing no longer espouses this nonsense, then legitimacy rests on little more than a claim that the party has enriched the nation.
In that case maintaining a growth rate of 7 per cent plus indeed becomes an important target. I mention it because I have the key to keeping it well above 7 per cent with little effort.
What the economic mandarins in Beijing must do is take the bottom-up approach. Instead of calculating GDP at the national level, they should add up the prefecture-level figures for every province and then add up these provincial totals. The result is magic.