China's rise proves naysayers wrong

China's recently released 2017 data on gross domestic product confirm it: the country's dramatic rise, with the concomitant increase in its global economic relevance, is not slowing down.

There has been fresh media chatter about the reliability of Chinese data, owing to reports that some provinces have been overestimating their economic performance in recent years. But for all we know, other provinces may have been doing the opposite. And the provinces that have admitted to inflating their data are not large enough to have a significant impact on the overall national data.

Moreover, two key points are often lost in the debate on China's official statistics, which it first started releasing in the late 1990s. First, the debate is relevant only if China is increasing the degree to which it overestimates its data. Second, the published data should be considered in the context of China's trading partners' own figures, as well as those of major international companies that do business in China.