Chinese Economics Thread
- Thread starter Norfolk
- Start date
Always do that at the end of the year to avoid looking like idiots.
proelite
Junior Member
Real-time prediction.
supercat
Colonel
In the first 8 months of 2025, China's railroad ridership grew 6.7%, while the operation of trains grew 7.7% year-over-year.
China's August economic data numbers including production. Industrial robot showed some really impressive growth so far this year.
I think I heard somewhere that China has now taken over Japan as the largest producer of industrial robots, is that right?
According to the chart posted, India(!) has a greater share of world manufacturing than Japan. In nominal GDP, Japan's manufacturing world share is about 7% and India is at 3% which seems much more realistic. China is at 30% in nominal GDP world market share.
PPP makes sense for comparing standard of life, e.g. prices can be cheaper in poorer countries for similar quality services. But it doesn't make sense for industry. A haircut is similar everywhere. But the industrial robots that China is producing today is probably vastly superior to almost anything produced anywhere except perhaps Japan. PPP cannot easily capture those quality differences, because it assumes a lot of prices differences are just due to baumol's cost disease. And that's not necessarily true for industry.
Ideally, we would have nominal GDP for "hard metrics" like industrial production and PPP for "soft metrics" like healthcare spending. But mixing and matching like this would be much more difficult than the current approach of either picking just PPP or nominal.