GDP management to meet or beat growth targets

By Chan Lyu, Kemin Wang, Frank Zhang, Xin Zhang. Journal of Accounting & Economics, 2018

111 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We apply the discontinuity methodology from the accounting literature to a political economy setting of GDP reporting and examine whether Chinese local governments manage regional GDP numbers. We find strong evidence of discontinuities around zero in the distribution of actual minus target GDP growth rates. The frequencies of just meeting or beating GDP growth targets are about five (four) times the frequencies of just missing targets at the prefecture (province) level. The results are stronger for governors with longer tenures and those without political connections to higher-level officials as well as for local governments with more resources under their control.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/904f659a13ebd17e2aa29f34a19ec4f61258c46d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Zheng Song
2. Chang-tai Hsieh
3. Xilu Chen
4. Charles I. Jones
5. Jacopo Ponticelli
6. Cecile Gaubert
7. Gordon H. Hanson
8. Michael Peters

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Chang-tai Hsieh
2. Jesse M. Rothstein

Citations in the corpus

• A Forensic Examination of China's National Accounts (2019, background): “And Lyu et al. (2018) present evidence that regional growth target can be achieved by fabricating data.”