笨狼發牢騷
發發牢騷，解解悶，消消愁
指的是2014年。
華爾街日報原文印度博客：
India Passes China to Become Fastest-Growing Economy
其中一個關鍵是印度把統計法子改了，結果增值真是讓人信心大增。有創意，好樣的。
India Inc: Tuesday, 10 February 2015 05:09
India set to overtake China in 2015
這標題乍聽起來像是印度馬上（全麵）超越中國了，嗬嗬，有急的。這比較老實：
Indian media: India's economy to reach a par China has a long way to go
2015/2/13
美國網站Quartz的分析比較實在：
No, India’s economy is not about to catch up with China’s anytime soon
不過印度去年總產值增長率超越中國，是事實，說不定今年也會。實際上和平、經濟互利，大家都有好處。數第一，估計中國數累了吧？而且有美國在哪兒，中國數什麽第一啊？
現在好了，印度第一，印度高興了，大家跟著高興。
【注】
沒調查印度去年是不是世界第一。
【附錄】
華爾街日報全文：
India Passes China to Become Fastest-Growing Economy
Everyone from the World Bank to Goldman Sachs had predicted it wouldn’t happen for another two years but recent recalculations indicate that India has already dethroned China as the world’s fastest-growing big economy.
Late Monday, India’s statistics ministry surprised economists when it unveiled the new numbers for the growth of India’s gross domestic product. It ratcheted up India’s GDP growth figures using a new methodology that pegs expansion in Asia’s third-largest economy at 7.5% last quarter and 8.2% the quarter before that. Economists and the ministry, using the old methodology, had originally said growth was closer to 5.5% during those quarters.
While economists, investors and executives are still wondering how growth could have been so high during those quarters when other indicators suggested times were tough, the new official numbers mean that India outpaced China, taking the pole position as the fastest-growing major economy in the world.
India has been able to catch up because China’s growth has been slowing. The Middle Kingdom’s GDP expansion was 7.3% in both the third and fourth quarters of 2014. While there are smaller economies which may have had stronger growth, this puts India on top after decades driving in China’s slipstream.
Of course, China’s economy is still four times the size of India’s.
“There’s no comparison between these growth rates because of the size of the economy of China,” said Ashish Kumar, director general of the Central Statistics Office as he announced the new GDP growth numbers. “If this kind of growth continues and China continues to perform at a lower level, then still it will take 20 to 30 years to catch up.”
Still, if it can keep up this pace at least India will be gaining some ground. More importantly, a return to high growth might mean India is following in China’s footsteps and entering a take-off phase.
The South Asian nation needs to revamp its economy to help create more manufacturing jobs and savings if it wants to become the next China, said Frederic Neumann, an economist at HSBC in a recent report.
“That’s a challenging transformation,” he said. “India may never quite match the rapid ascent of China, but even at a slightly slower speed it will start to make waves.”
【後記2015.02.17】
華爾街日報詳解印度統計方法的變化：
Is India’s Economy Really Growing Faster Than China?
Statistical agency says improved measurement methods yield higher growth; not all are convinced
By RAYMOND ZHONG, Feb. 17, 2015
NEW DELHI—India might be the world’s fastest-growing large economy right now—or the country’s statisticians might have miscounted.
On Tuesday, the agency in charge of the computation offered details about why, after changing the way it estimates gross domestic product last month, it now believes economic output will expand by 7.4% in the year ending in March. At 7.5%, India’s revised growth estimate for the fourth quarter of last year beat China’s 7.3%.
The growth boost, the Central Statistics Office said in a 10-page document, is partly due to better measurement of manufacturing activity, made possible by a new database of corporate balance sheets.
The statistics office also explained why the Indian economy was a lot smaller a few years ago than previously estimated. Activity by small retailers and wholesalers had been overstated, the document said, “by a very large margin.”
T.C.A. Anant, India’s chief statistician, said the new figures for gross domestic product offer a more accurate picture of economic activity in the world’s second-most-populous country. “There is a lot of modernization which is happening,” he said.
Doubts about the figures remain, however. A wide swath of other data, from corporate revenues to auto sales, indicates an economy struggling to escape the doldrums.
“When they generate such a ridiculous outcome, they need to go back and find out what could potentially be wrong in the data set,” said Chetan Ahya, chief Asia economist at Morgan Stanley.
Measuring an economy as sprawling and short on formal record-keeping as India’s isn’t easy.
A mammoth share of the country’s output is produced by individuals and small enterprises that don’t pay taxes and aren’t registered with the government. These curbside barbers, neighborhood motorcycle repairmen, pushcart fruit vendors and others account for two-thirds of India’s nonfarm workforce. That amounts to 150 million people, more than the population of Japan.
But one major segment of them—mom-and-pop stores and small-time wholesalers—contributes less to India’s GDP than previously thought, according to a government survey conducted in 2011 and 2012. Previously, statisticians relied on a 15-year-old survey that measured those businesses. The data revision caused the Indian economy’s total size in the new base year—the 12 months that ended in March 2012—to shrink by 2%.
The statistics office also said it updated what it does between detailed surveys to estimate domestic trade and other services connected to the production of goods. Previously, it used indicators of output volume—how many goods are being produced—to approximate the value added to the economy, or how much those goods are worth.
New data sources now allow added value to be gauged more precisely, it said. Domestic trade, household repairs and telecommunications will be tracked using data on sales-tax collections; for hotels, real estate, accountants and lawyers, corporate data will be used.
Better measurement of added value is crucial for understanding a rapidly developing economy like India’s, the statistics office said, particularly in manufacturing.
Manufacturers in India aren’t just assembling products anymore, said Mr. Anant, the chief statistician. They are developing, marketing and selling them too, and often in franchises and other retail arrangements. They are also bundling them with warranties and other services.
Little if any of this activity had previously been reflected in GDP, Mr. Anant said. “I’m capturing a part of the value chain which I was not capturing well earlier,” he said.
“The new series is conceptually different,” he added, so it may naturally appear out of sync with what we thought we knew about the economy’s trajectory. “Analytical understandings will have to adapt.”
Other, smaller updates were long overdue. To gauge the construction sector, previous GDP data relied on a survey of building materials from 1980, said Ashish Kumar, director-general of the statistics office. Now based on a fresh study, the new output numbers include data on glass and asphalt use for the first time.
Not all are convinced. Neelkanth Mishra, a Mumbai-based analyst at Credit Suisse, said growth getting revised up bothers him less than the economy’s size getting revised down. However much the informal economy was being overestimated in the past, Mr. Mishra said, even more was being underestimated.
“They’ve lost themselves a lot of credibility,” he said.
India’s statistics office already wins few points for consistency and user-friendliness. GDP data are released with long delay and then get periodically revised—or corrected. On Aug. 31, 2010, the office announced 3.7% GDP growth for the April-to-June quarter—then, a day later, admitted the figure was based on computational errors. Growth, the office said, was actually 10%.
Measuring an economy isn’t like measuring a coastline. The data—which in India include everything from housing costs and the chicken population to how much timber, firewood and leaves used for animal feed are collected from forests—can be frustratingly inexact. And extrapolating to the rest of the economy requires heaps of simplifying assumptions.
Even for Mr. Anant, getting a handle on the Indian economy is a work in progress. He said the newly revised growth estimate for the year that ended in March 2014—6.9%, up from 4.7%—is already scheduled for another revision sometime before January 2016.
