The Financial Times mentioned in an article titled "I'm sorry for the United States, China's economy is bigger than yours" that instead of converting according to the market exchange rate of RMB and the US dollar, it will be recalculated by referring to the difference in the amount of money that needs to be paid in China and the United States.
China's economy will no longer be lower than that of the United States, but will become the world's largest economy. This is what we usually call the "purchasing power parity index", which highlights the conversion factor between the real purchasing power of currencies in each country, and excludes the interference of exchange rate fluctuations.
The World Bank announced that the conversion factor between the yuan and the US dollar in 2022 is 399, that is, if you need to pay 399 yuan to buy a basket of goods and services in China, you need to pay $100 to buy this basket of goods and services in the United States.
In the PPP accounting rules, it is no longer 72 yuan is exchanged for 1 dollar, which is converted into 3The real purchasing power of 99 RMB is equivalent to 1 US dollar.
Under this new statistical rule, China's economy will no longer be about 70% of the size of the United States, but will become the leader of the world. After Nansheng shared the news, many netizens said: China's economic scale is underestimated, which is a well-known thing.
Ignoring the interference of exchange rate fluctuations, it is more scientific to re-examine the GDP of China and the United States by the difference between the actual purchasing power of the renminbi and the US dollar. In this regard, Nansheng has a lot of questions: Is this new statistical rule really more scientific than the exchange rate method?
The answer, probably, is no
First of all, because the economic and trade ties between countries and regions in the world are getting closer and closer, and goods and services from the international market continue to impact the goods in each country. According to the World Bank's test, 3The purchasing power of 99 RMB is equivalent to 1 US dollar in the United States.
But Chinese oil importers, when negotiating with the leaders of oil and gas groups in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Angola, Malaysia, the United States and Canada, can say: we pay for oil imports by purchasing power ratio, that is, 399 RMB to 1 USD.
Similarly, Chinese importers want to take 3When the 99 yuan to $1 is used to buy coal from Indonesia, soybeans from the United States and Brazil, and liquefied natural gas from Australia, Russia and Qatar, they will explicitly refuse.
The second reason is that the United Nations, the World Bank and other institutions refer to the criterion of "same or similar quality" when measuring the "basket of goods and services".
In the real world, the measurement standards for goods and services are different in different countries, and a basket of goods of the same quality almost does not exist. That adds ambiguity to the selection of a "basket of goods of similar quality".
More importantly, how to scientifically compare the larger number of "different types of goods, different quality goods" between them?Economists from all over the world still can't agree on this, and there is a "gap" in data measurement.
The third is that the Chinese population is large, the land area is huge, the economic development of various regions is very uneven, prices fluctuate greatly, and the actual purchasing power of the RMB is different in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangxi, Anhui and other places.
Taking the example published by the World Bank, the euro is the common currency of 20 countries in the eurozone. On the territory of Germany, in 2022 0The purchasing power of 73 euros is equivalent to 1 dollar in the United States.
In France, 07 euros is equivalent to 1 dollar;0. in Greece53 euros, equivalent to 1 US dollar;In Luxembourg, 084 euros is equivalent to 1 US dollar;In Slovenia, 056 euros, which is equivalent to 1 dollar of ...... purchasing power
In other words, China is too big, and it should be more scientific to refer to the method of the euro area to distinguish our provinces as independent units, and to obtain the conversion factor between the real purchasing power of the renminbi and the US dollar in each province.
Fourth, when the United Nations and the World Bank formulated relevant rules, they mainly referred to the characteristics of the industrial structure of developed economies such as the United States and Europe, and did not make more scientific arrangements for developing countries, and the representation of China, India, Brazil and other countries was weak.
Tsinghua University, in the journal Statistics and Information Forum, criticized the system of formulating rules for purchasing power parity, to the effect that this set of rules is suspected of being tailored to the developed economies and overestimating the size of the economies of developing countries.
It is precisely because of the above-mentioned shortcomings in the statistical rules of purchasing power parity that they are not universally accepted by the international community. Many countries don't even report on it in depth, just as a reference for the academic community. What do netizens think about this?This article is written by Nansheng, please do not plagiarize without authorization!