Tianjin is likely to see official gross domestic product drop by almost 20% in 2017 after authorities recognised severe double-counting in the port’s showcase financial district.
The revision comes on the heels of a similar acknowledgement by Inner Mongolia that implies its GDP was also inflated by about 20 percent in 2016. The magnitude of falsified data in Northern China is only slowly becoming apparent after a four-year downturn in the coal, steel and oil on which the region depends was papered over by governments eager to show robust growth.
2011-2016 Five Cities' GDP
The Binhai district in Tianjin acknowledged that it was including in its GDP the activity of thousands of companies that registered in the district in order to enjoy tax breaks, a looser forex regime or other incentives. Those firms’ actual commercial activity took place elsewhere in China.
As a result, Binhai’s 2016 GDP was revised to Rmb665bn from an initial official figure of Rmb1tn, according to data presented at the district people’s congress meeting and released by the Weibo microblog account of the city government’s official radio station. Last year, Tianjin’s total official GDP – more than half of which was contributed by the Binhai district – was Rmb1.8tn.
Tianjin is likely to see official gross domestic product drop by almost 20% in 2017 after authorities recognised severe double-counting in the port’s showcase financial district.
The revision comes on the heels of a similar acknowledgement by Inner Mongolia that implies its GDP was also inflated by about 20 percent in 2016. The magnitude of falsified data in Northern China is only slowly becoming apparent after a four-year downturn in the coal, steel and oil on which the region depends was papered over by governments eager to show robust growth.
As a result, Binhai’s 2016 GDP was revised to Rmb665bn from an initial official figure of Rmb1tn, according to data presented at the district people’s congress meeting and released by the Weibo microblog account of the city government’s official radio station. Last year, Tianjin’s total official GDP – more than half of which was contributed by the Binhai district – was Rmb1.8tn.
