China has an economic data problem. Is the U.S. next?

Make Me Smart

Marketplace

News, Business

4.6 • 5.4K Ratings

🗓️ 13 August 2025

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Since President Trump’s firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner over a weak jobs report, we’ve been thinking a lot about the trustworthiness of U.S. economic data. Other countries like China can offer a glimpse of what happens when that trust erodes. On the show today, Marketplace’s China correspondent Jennifer Pak explains how she works around unreliable data when reporting on the Chinese economy. Plus, could the United States be headed in the same direction?

Here’s everything we talked about today:

"12 million students in China will graduate this year into a shaky job market" from Marketplace
"China says its unemployment rate is “stable,” but job seekers remain gloomy" from Marketplace
"Is GDP still a useful gauge of China’s economy?" from Marketplace
"How Bad Is China’s Economy? The Data Needed to Answer Is Vanishing" from The Wall Street Journal
"How to deal with untrustworthy government economic data? Look to China" from Marketplace
"Trump taps Heritage economist to lead BLS" from Politico

We love hearing from you. Leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART or email [email protected].

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey everybody, I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today make sense.
0:12.1	And I'm Rima Grace. Thank you for joining us on this Wednesday, August 13th. On Monday, President Trump
0:18.6	named his pick for a new head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after firing the previous commissioner a little over a week ago over a job support he did not like.
0:28.2	He chose E.J. and Tony, who's a longtime critic of the agency. He is a conservative economist at the Heritage Foundation.
0:36.5	And if he's approved by the Senate,
0:37.8	he'll take control of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And what's been going on at the BLS has
0:43.8	us thinking about what it could mean for the future of government economic data in the United
0:49.0	States, which we've been talking about a lot, trust in that data. And what it would look like if people no longer trusted
0:58.2	the data about the economy coming out from the U.S. government, how that would change the way that
1:03.2	we look at the economy and how it would change the way that others look at the economy.
1:06.7	Mm-hmm. And other countries have been down this road. China's government is notorious for doctoring its
1:14.1	data. So we wanted to talk to someone who deals with his firsthand. Our colleague, Jennifer Pack,
1:18.9	she reports on the Chinese economy from Shanghai. And she is here to tell us about how she and others
1:23.9	managed to do their job without reliable data. Welcome to the show, Jennifer.
1:28.9	Thanks for having me. So first, when we talk about headline numbers in China like GDP,
1:35.2	how do economists know that they are in fact not reliable? Well, the short answer is they don't,
1:43.9	but let's backtrack a bit. A lot of times when people say the data is not reliable is really stemming from the fact that the Chinese government basically every year sets a target of how much they think the economy is going to grow or they say estimate. And somehow magically,
2:02.7	they say a lot of times it always hits that target or exceeds it, of course. And so especially
2:10.1	during the COVID years, you know, in 2023, which was just the year after all of those really
2:17.0	strict lockdowns had ended, China still
2:20.4	hit economic target growth of 5%. Now, I find that a lot of analysts, they kind of split into
2:27.8	two camps. One camp says, okay, the data doesn't really quite make sense because how could China's GDP be so
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 12 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Marketplace, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Marketplace and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.