China: Beijing Improves Its GDP Reporting at a Crucial Time Politically

In the past, China has been criticized for the poor quality of its official economic statistics, but the country is on a quest to modernize and improve its economic data collection and calculation standards. For its Oct. 19 quarterly release of data -- including gross domestic product -- China's National Bureau of Statistics will once again adjust the way it handles research and development expenditures. Under the new methodology, the statistics bureau will include R&D expenditures after previously counting them as intermediate capital deductions....