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A country's economic growth is supposedly, and rightly, the sum of those of all its regions. But sometimes things are not so simple.

The National Development and Reform Commission revealed on Monday that in the first half of this year, the 31 provinces and regions on the Chinese mainland each witnessed a double-digit gross domestic product (GDP) growth. Their overall growth rate would be 12 percent.

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) put the national figure for the same period at 10.9 percent. The 1.1 percentage points would mean a yawning gap of 80.48 billion yuan (US$10.06 billion).

Experts generally take the gap as a result of the numbers game played by local governments, not the central government's desire to play down the partially overheating economy.

This sounds plausible, at least.

Local officials have a reputation for padding their GDP figures. They have either technically been loose in investigation and collection of the figures or just purposefully balloon them up to show how adept they are in managing the economy.

The central statisticians have repeatedly condemned the local behavior, but there were few signs of improvement, at least until now.

It is said that every year, the NBS has to take pains to peel off part of the GDP growth reported by the local authorities so that the figures it finally releases could match the real economic scenario.

The local doctoring of economic figures is detestable and may shake the authority of the country's statistical work if it goes unchecked.

The central authorities, however, must reflect on why such blatant behavior could have gone wild, and find a way out.

Thus far, they have relied on double-checking to find and correct local problems. But local officials seldom are seriously punished for their mistakes, which is what the Statistics Law has stipulated.

Admittedly, the weak implementation of the law has encouraged local officials to act willfully.

One the other hand, a change in the official career appraisal system would be more demanding. When GDP is no longer the paramount index to gauge officials' career successes, things should improve.

Making local statisticians independent of local influence is another option. Currently, they are financially supported by local governments, which also have a say in their promotion.

The ultimate way out is to publish those provincial figures and make the local officials more accountable to the public so that effective supervision could be put in place.

(China Daily August 9, 2006)