China will revise its historical regional GDP data under a unified accounting mechanism from early next year, the National Bureau of Statistics said, amid the continued slowdown of the world’s second largest economy.
The Chinese economy grew at an annual pace of 6% in the July-September quarter, the slowest growth since 1992. The slowdown is exacerbated by the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China. In November this year, China revised its 2018 GDP, saying the economy was 2.1% bigger than earlier estimated, revising the gross domestic product for 2018 to 91.93 trillion yuan ($13.1 trillion) from USD 12.8 trillion.
The new mechanism will unify the standards and procedures for calculating national and local GDP numbers which had been calculated under different accounting methods adopted by local and national statistics authorities since 1985, state-run Xinhua news agency quoted the National Bureau of Statistic (NBS) as reporting on Friday
The reform is expected to close the current discrepancy between national and regional figures, improving data quality while enhancing the credibility of the government statistics, it said.
To ensure data comparability, the country will also revise historical local GDP figures and publish them in 2020, the Bureau said.
