Unified accounting key to higher quality growth

ACCORDING TO THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STATISTICS all the preparatory work has been completed and it will start to calculate the gross domestic product of local governments from next year. Beijing Youth Daily comments:

If the reform is well implemented, it will wring out some of the water from the local GDP data to make the figures more reliable. The reform will break the original "data islands", and ensure the national data can more objectively and accurately reflect the economic scale, structure and development speed of the country and regions, and so help the central government effectively judge the macroeconomic situation.

The move, which has had to overcome considerable resistance from local governments, symbolizes a substantial step forward in the sensitive reforms balancing the relations between the central and local governments.