ABSTRACT
China has recently experienced episodes of very rapid growth. In the past two decades of double digit annual growth, much of Chinas growth has occurred in the coastal provinces, of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong. There are serious problems with measurement in provincial level data from China. State owned enterprises (SOEs) have been and remain major actors on Chinas economic stage. Additional sources include the English/Chinese language China Statistical Yearbook in various printed and CD-ROM editions. Advances in statistical analysis computing power have made it possible to move away from cross-sectional studies which use long-run growth across a sample of several dozen countries. Instead, focus has begun to shift to panel regressions that utilize data from several countries observed at several points in time. The process for gathering the data is not as transparent as one would wish and there are real concerns about political manipulation of the data, particularly since 1998.
