Jake's View | Fake figures give the lie to our ‘slumping’ retail sales figures
How about including consumer services and web sales, and give due weight to consumer durables
Memo to the Census and Statistics Department: Will you people please stop publishing your flawed and unrepresentative retail sales data series or at least clean it up so that it no longer contradicts your other statistics.
Things are nowhere near as bad as these figures suggest. I simply do not believe that there was a decline of 6.5 per cent year on year in the growth of retail sales in January. What we actually had was an outdated statistical survey that fails to capture what is really happening in the market.
The full report on consumer activity is published every three months as part of the gross domestic product figures. In recent years the retail sales figures have captured at best only 31 per cent of this spending and for the last two years it has been steadily less, as the first chart shows.
Just for starters, the retail sales series entirely ignores consumer services although these now account for almost 60 per cent of consumer spending in the domestic market. They also take no account of internet shopping, another growth area.
READ MORE: Crystal ball clearly shows further yuan weakening
They do, however, give double the weighting of the GDP figures to spending on consumer durables and this is a sector in which prices are plummeting.
In other words, one reason that retail sales growth is officially so far in negative territory is not slow sales but too great a weighting in goods for which prices are way down. Would you, however, call falling prices bad news? Do you mind paying less?