China’s Economic Growth Looks Strong, Maybe Too Strong

Re:China’s Economic Growth Looks Strong, Maybe Too Strong by Symmetry on Thursday January 18, 2018 @11:57AM (#16178641)

I think the OP might have been misunderstanding a thing that actually happens. Because officials are graded on whether they hit targets or not but they don't get extra points for exceeding them they have an incentive to under-report growth in good years so that a return to accurate reporting in bad years lets them still report growth. So there will be a combination of over and under-reporting of growth at different times, as was show in the graphs in the article. How China Escaped the Poverty Trap goes into more detail for those interested.

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Re:China’s Economic Growth Looks Strong, Maybe Too Strong by contingencies on Thursday January 18, 2018 @12:35PM (#16179152)

... except top-level officials are constantly shuffled between posts in different cities/provinces they have no family ties to specifically to prevent such corruption.

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Re:China’s Economic Growth Looks Strong, Maybe Too Strong by dragonwriter on Thursday January 18, 2018 @12:42PM (#16179259)

That only actually prevents it if:

(1) rotations are most often exactly one of the periods on which goals and evaluations occur (that is, understating growth that at least meets the goal never is expected to help you by making it more likely you can plausibly claim to meet a growth goal the next period), and

(2) the rotating top-level officials have some other structursl disincentive to form a class identity and class norms (stack ranking where the top slice promotes into a national administration group and the bottom slice is demoted out of regional leadership, while the middle group remains, for instance, would do this, since everyone would have a strong incentive to make everyone else's results relatively worse; OTOH, this incentivizes an opposite kind of misreporting, so it's not really a solution.)

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Re:China’s Economic Growth Looks Strong, Maybe Too Strong by contingencies on Thursday January 18, 2018 @02:03PM (#16180202)

some other structural disincentive

Oh you mean like "play by the rules, have a nice life for you and your family" versus "capital punishment for you, and movement restriction and asset seizure for your family"?

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Re:China’s Economic Growth Looks Strong, Maybe Too Strong by dragonwriter on Thursday January 18, 2018 @02:17PM (#16180353)

Sure, if the punishment is perceived to be applied reliably and accurately.

If it's perceived to be applied in a spotty manner, according to shifting whims of the leadership as to issues of concern, and with favoritism that can see the guilty free and the innocent punished, then, no, that just incentivizes currying favor and trying to influence the leadership perception that drive where enforcement is and isn't focussed.

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