FORBES
JAN 17, 2016 @ 08:14 PM 6,735 VIEWS
Gordon G. Chang , CONTRIBUTOR
Tuesday, China’s National Bureau of Statistics releases its first estimate of 2015 gross domestic product.
Premier Li Keqiang on Saturday said growth last year came in around 7% for 2015, which was his target, announced last March.
Analysts polled by Reuters peg growth at 6.9%, which would be the lowest rate in 25 years.
Indicators for the year, however, point to a number in the low single digits, perhaps 1%.
In 2007, when Li was Communist Party secretary of Liaoning province, he told a visiting American diplomat that Beijing’s figures were “man-made,†politically directed and therefore unreliable. He said he looked at three factors when trying to understand what the economy was really doing: electricity consumption, rail freight volume, and bank lending.
So what does the “Li Keqiang Index,†as these factors are now known, tell us? The usage of electricity remains the most reliable single indicator of Chinese economic activity. In the first 11 months of 2015, electricity consumption increased 0.7%.
Rail freight volume fell 10.5% in 2015, according to Caixin, which cited the National Railway Administration.
New renminbi loans last year, according to the People’s Bank of China, amounted to 11.72 trillion yuan, an increase of 1.81 trillion yuan from 2014. Foreign-currency loans in 2015 fell $50.2 billion. In 2014, such loans increased $58.2 billion.
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