False data no cure for slow development

The Inner Mongolia autonomous region recently joined Liaoning province in admitting falsities in its economic and budgetary data.

At an economic work conference earlier this month, the Inner Mongolia regional government said some of its lower-level governments have inflated their budgetary incomes by 53 billion yuan ($8.17 billion) and industrial output by 290 billion yuan. This prompted the Inner Mongolia statistics authority to trim the region's GDP for 2016, and the regional government to halt work on some railway projects and other government-subsidized programs, a Xinhua News Agency report said.

Liaoning province, too, was found to have fudged economic data during an inspection early last year. But the falsifying of economic data in Inner Mongolia was on a much larger scale, because compared with the 20-30 percent over-reporting of data in Liaoning, the industrial added value of Inner Mongolia was padded by 40 percent for 2016.