Tomorrow, China's National Bureau of Statistics will announce its official economic data for last year. At about 10.5 per cent, the figure for gross domestic product growth will again be spectacular.
It will also almost certainly be wrong.
We know roughly what China's growth rate for the year will be because Ma Kai, the head of the National Development and Reform Commission, gave the game away two weeks ago when he let slip the government's preliminary estimate. The number to be announced tomorrow may differ slightly but not to any significant degree.
We will also be able to feel pretty confident that the growth figure is suspect, simply because the various components that go into it do not add up.
China's GDP, like that of any economy, is the final sum of all the goods and services produced in the country during the year. Put simply, the total consists of everything people consumed, everything businesses invested and everything the government spent, minus what was imported from outside, plus what was produced domestically and then exported.
In reality, the computation is a shade more complicated than that. For example, we have to account for changes in stockpiles of raw materials and inventories of finished goods but the effect is small.