The Rudd strategy Part II: just how good is China's economy?

Can China's GDP be believed?

World Bank bowed to pressure from Beijing to withhold publication of its Cost of Pollution in China - Economic Estimates of Physical Damages 2006 report.

Despite the pressure, the World Bank released a sanitised version, that included:

… the combined health and non-health cost of outdoor air and water pollution for China's economy comes to around $US100 billion a year (or about 5.8 per cent of China's GDP).

… that pollution and contaminated water were directly responsible for the premature deaths of 750,000 each year.

In 2005, China implemented a Green GDP trial that was shelved when completed in 2007 and access denied.

Late 2006, China's official ratio of debt to GDP was set at 18 per cent, well below the global alarm level of 60 per cent.

An independent 2006 study estimated public debt level was four times that of the official figure, and the debt to GDP ratio should be around 81 per cent commenting:

No matter how you calculate this ratio, China has too much debt.

A 2008 independent report on the impact of environmental degradation on the economy, estimated that air borne pollutants alone cost China US$248 billion (7.1 per cent of GDP for 2007).

Also excluded is the future cost of repairing the damage to China's environment and contribution to global warming. A primary cause is increasing emissions from China's energy expansion program that has commissioned four new 1GW coal fired stations each month since 2004 and continues into 2020. These are not modern state of the art units incorporating efficient emission control.

Multinationals produce roughly 60 per cent of China’s exports, mostly for US and EU markets. Cutbacks are responding to sliding demand.

A decline of 1 per cent in the US economy can trigger a 1.3 per cent decline in China's economic growth.