Top legislature reviews report on statistics law

BEIJING - The National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee on Wednesday reviewed a report on the implementation of the Statistics Law in Beijing.

"China's statistics work has played a significant role in economic and social development, and the supervision of statistics work has been improving," said the report submitted to the standing committee at its four-day bimonthly session.

"Government offices and departments at all levels have collected, stored, processed, provided and published large amount of statistical data," the report said.

"This statistics work is very important for the country's decision-making and macro-management, and presents much information for the public to understand economic and social development, and for the enterprises to acquire market signals," said Wang Dongming, vice chairman of the NPC Standing Committee, who read the report to the lawmakers.

According to the report, the National Bureau of Statistics has investigated 72 major violation cases in 26 provincial regions in 2017 and the first four months of 2018.

The report also pointed out several problems found during inspections, including data falsification, overstating, low efficiency of data usage and light punishment.

The report called for enhanced supervision of government offices and departments to comply with the Statistics Law to ensure independence of the statistics organizations and personnel.

The punishment on Statistics Law violations should be stepped up to strengthen its authority, the report said.

The Statistics Law was enacted in 1983 and revised in 1996 and 2009. The report was based on the first nationwide inspection of the Statistics Law implementation since the latest revision.