The US investment bank Goldman Sachs is to publish its own index of economic activity in China. The China Activity index seeks to provide a more accurate measure of economic activity than the official statistics, which are prone to manipulation by officials. The index looks at foreign trade, transport and energy usage and compares these with traditional measures such as domestic output, investment, profit and earnings.
This is the first time in the industry that such an index has been published, although foreign academics have long provided their own estimates of China's GDP growth. Both the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank use official government data to analyse the Chinese economy.