Like many analysts, Capital Economics did not trust the data. But it went further by creating its own measure of economic activity, the China activity proxy, which considers industrial output like metals, freight, container, passenger traffic, machinery sales, and electricity consumption. In other words, measures that are more difficult to massage than a broad-based GDP figure that is spat out once every three months.
Their conclusion was that China’s economy was already 9 per cent smaller than its pre-pandemic level. Nowhere near the 3 per cent, 8 per cent, and 2.3 per cent growth rates advertised by the Bureau of Statistics between 2019 and 2022.
