Central authorities to count cost of exaggerated local performance

INSTEAD OF THE LOCAL GOVERNMENTS, the central authorities will now produce the provincial GDP figures. Beijing News comments:

The sum of all the provincial GDP figures has been markedly higher than the national GDP since 1996. Last year, the gap was nearly 2.8 trillion yuan ($413 billion).

Before Wang Baoan, the former head of the National Bureau of Statistics, was sacked for corruption in January 2016, the bureau attributed the gap to technical reasons.