VT Foreign Policy
The Great Figures Swindle.
How come Countries so strong and powerful as China and Russia aren’t ”rich” enough to support the demand of their systems according to World Bank figures?
Is this perhaps a form of hybrid cognitive war?
A major Asia Times article on the true size of China’s economy, which may actually be much larger than we generally think.
- China’s GDP PPP is really “only” 25% larger than that of the United States when last year:
- China generated twice as much electricity as the United States;
- it produced 12.6 times more steel and 22 times more cement;
- 26 million vehicles were sold in China, 68% more than the 15.5 million sold in the United States;
- Chinese consumers purchased 434 million smartphones, three times the 144 million sold in the United States;
- China consumes twice as much meat and eight times as much fish as the United States;
- Chinese shoppers spend twice as much on luxury goods as American shoppers;
- Chinese travelers took 620 million flights, 25% fewer than the 819 million flights taken by Americans, but Chinese travelers also took 3 billion trips on high-speed trains (and 685 million on traditional trains), significantly more than the 28 million Amtrak trips;
Somehow the $1 trillion a year that the US allocates to defense (including intelligence and Department of Energy programs) has caused the US Navy to shrink, while China’s $236 billion budget has built the largest navy in the world by number of ships.
Another thought-provoking statistic that isn’t in the article concerns international travel. In 2019, pre-Covid, Chinese people made 155 million outbound international trips
( http://xinhuanet.com/english/2020-11/11/c_139509342.htm ).
In contrast, Americans took 99.7 million trips abroad that same year
( https://trade.gov/sites/default/files/2023-10/2022%20US%20Resident%20Outbound%20Travel.pdf )
So, given all this, does this mean that the PPP (at constant prices) of China’s GDP is actually lower than reality?
The author of the original Asian Times piece writes also that looking too much at the services, tertiary sector, would lead to underestimating China’s GDP.
This is because China traditionally calculates GDP based on the material products system (MPS) of national accounts, which excludes services because it considers them necessary costs of material production rather than the creation of real value.
Services are now included in the calculation, but probably not as a proportion of US GDP.
This matters because US GDP growth is overwhelmingly driven by services…
And the author points out the artificiality of this: “As necessary services become an ever-increasing share of Western economies, their growth does not appear to result in improvements perceivable in the system.
Are living standards twice as good as they were in 2000? Taking a step back, the GDP PPP is intended to give an idea of the size of an economy that takes into account the relative difference in local prices.
To simplify, suppose we have an economy made up exclusively of sales of Big Macs: if they cost twice less in country A than in country B, but in country A as many Big Macs are sold as in country B, then their GDP PPP is the same…
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… (vtforeignpolicy.com)
Home | Caravan to Midnight (zutalk.com)
Be First to Comment