(Shanghai Daily)
Updated: 2007-08-03 08:56

The combined total of GDP figures released by China's provincial-level governments for the first half year has added up to 11.92 trillion yuan (US$1.55 trillion).

This is a full 1.24 trillion yuan higher than the figure released by the central government last month, Shanghai Securities News reported yesterday.

The disparity could reach 2.5 trillion yuan for the whole of 2007, equivalent to the 2006 GDP of Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing combined.

The average GDP growth rate reported by local governments has been "around two percentage points" higher than the national figure for six consecutive years.

Vigorous regional economic cooperation was a "new factor" that puffed up the local GDP figures in 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities on the Chinese mainland, who "wittingly or unwittingly" did repeated calculations by counting mutual investment and trade into their own GDP, said the report.

"Regional economic integration does make it more difficult for provinces to figure out their GDP, leading to big errors in computation," Zhao Yanyun, associate professor with Beijing-based Renmin University of China, was quoted as saying.

Largely to blame for the misreporting, however, is a system that has made the pursuit of economic growth the top criteria for provincial-level governments and officials.