China works for a more unified GDP calculation

BEIJING - China will ramp up efforts to make national and provincial GDP calculation more unified to ensure statistics more accurately reflect economic performance, an official said on Tuesday.

Unified plans for local GDP calculation should be drawn up as soon as possible, National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) chief Ma Jiantang said.

As GDP growth used to be a crucial factor for local officials' job promotion, problems existed between the usually inflated sum of provincial GDP figures and the national GDP statistics calculated by the NBS.

Ma said China will review national and provincial GDP figures calculated in 2013 and earlier years with the new method while urging stricter calculation of quarterly and whole-year provincial GDP growth this year.

The calculation of energy consumption in GDP growth shall also be improved this year to make GDP statistics more relevant.

The NBS aims to more effectively track the country's fixed asset investment by switching from an analysis of the progress of projects to an examination of a unit's fiscal outlay.