Macroscope | China's economic data is dodgy, but it doesn't matter for commodities

There is widespread scepticism about the accuracy of mainland China's economic growth numbers, but the real question shouldn’t be whether the data is credible, it should be whether it matters that it isn’t.

The official year-on-year gross domestic product (GDP) growth figure of 6.9 per cent for the September quarter was widely condemned by mainly Western economists as a fiction bearing little resemblance to actual economic activity.

At the World Commodities Week conference in London last week, the consensus was that mainland GDP growth was more in the region of 5 per cent to 6 per cent, and that the official number owes more to political expediency than to economic reality.

While this may indeed by true, the issue really should be whether absolutely accurate data is necessary when trying to get a handle on China.

If you move from the economic world to the commodities world, China watchers have grappled with dubious statistics for so long that they have become inured to them, to the point where some barely reference official numbers.

For example, very few analysts believe the output data provided by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).