Comment: Stability and Commercial Information – An Economic Approach and a Look at China

China's transition to a market economy is accompanied by an unprecedented eco-nomic growth. However, due to structural problems the economic dynamism seems to have been running out of steam since the late 1990s. In its recent report "China in the World Economy. The Domestic Policy Challenges", the OECD attributes the structural problems to a lack of integration in factor markets, among business seg-ments, and among regions. The OECD report is comprised of an impressive number of sector studies and analyses of economy-wide issues. It is based on the commonly available set of Chinese government data without questioning whether we can rely on this official version of reality. In contrast, the question of the quality of official information has been frequently picked up in many press reports and by a number of economists over the past years. Since 1997, doubts about the accuracy of officially published statistics seem to have been supported by discrepancies between the growth of key expansion indicators such as power consumption and freight traffic and GDP growth. In its publication "World Economic Outlook " of December 1998, the International Monetary Fun