Economists studying China face thorny theoretical and empirical issues, mostly deriving from the country's years of central planning and strict government control of many industries, which tend to distort prices and misallocate resources. In addition, since the Chinese national accounting system differs from the systems used in most Western nations, it is difficult to derive internationally comparable data on the Chinese economy. Figures for Chinese economic growth consequently vary depending on how an analyst decides to account for them.
Although economists have many ways of explaining--or modeling--economic growth, a common approach is the neoclassical framework, which describes how productive factors such as capital and labor combine to generate output and which offers analytical simplicity and a well-developed methodology. Although commonly applied to market economies, the neoclassical model has also been used to analyze command economies. It is an appropriate first step in looking at the Chinese economy and yields useful "benchmark" estimates for future research. The framework does, however, have some limitations in the Chinese context.
Original data for the new IMF research came from material released from the State Statistical Bureau of China and other government agencies. Problematically, the component statistics used to compile the Chinese gross national product (GNP) have been kept only since 1978; before that, Chinese central planners worked under the concept of gross social output (GSO), which excluded many segments of the economy counted under GNP. Fortunately, China also compiled an intermediate output series called national income, which lies somewhere between GNP and GSO and is available from 1952 to 1993. After making appropriate adjustments to the national income statistics, including adjusting for indirect business taxes, these data can be used to analyze the sources of Chinese economic growth.
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