Revising Calculations
It turns out that China’s economy is not nearly as large as previously thought.
China’s economy, said the bank, is smaller than it thought.
About 40% smaller.
China, it turns out, isn’t a $10-trillion economy on the brink of catching up with the United States. It is a $6-trillion economy, less than half our size. For the foreseeable future, China will have far less money to spend on its military and will face much deeper social and economic problems at home than experts previously believed.
This is noteworthy for a variety of reasons but I call attention to it as a means of showing how fickle the ‘truth’ can be. Like global warming, there has been a variety of coverage on the growth of China. Like global warming there has been a great many experts advising based on the massive growth of China. Like global warming there has been policy recommendations. And with one single report based off solid data everything changes. One can only think the same thing is bound to happen with global warming.
December 30th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
Wait… I thought economists were the reliable ones? At least, that seems to be your position so far, given that you are willing to trust economists’ predictions of economic calamities as a result of reducing our dependence on fossil fuels more than you are willing to trust climatologists’ predictions of climactic calamities if we take no action.
Speaking of China’s terrible economy, it’s always comforting to know that the dollar is strong.
http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?from=USD&to=CNY&amt=1&t=2y
Sarcasm aside, I’ve always thought GDP calculations, while occasionally useful in a general sense, have to be taken with a grain of salt for more reasons than just this. I’ll remember this the next time you bring up GDP to support an argument though.
If the link is right there on the page, could you please link directly to the original sources? I find it irritating to follow a link and then find out it goes to some pundit nonsense I don’t care about, so that I have to follow another link to get to the thing that matters.
January 2nd, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Hey, who else remembers when teh US had a $1,000,000,000,000 surplus? Boy, those were the good old days.