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The Economist.

From The Economist in London, this is Money Talks, a weekly programme about news in the worlds of business, finance and economics.

I'm Edward McBride, the finance editor.

Every time China announces new growth figures, sceptics question the accuracy of the data. On this week's show,

I'll be discussing a new study that showed some light on Chinese statistics with John O'Sullivan,

our economics editor. We'll also be looking at the asset management industry, which is facing a leaner future.

With me to talk about that is Philip Kogan, our Buttonwood columnist.

Let's start with you, John.

The paper I mentioned doesn't actually look at growth statistics, right?

It looks at demographic statistics to try and work out how accurate Chinese government data is.

So the study is actually of about a thousand local officials, a study by economists at

Duke University and the University of Colorado, and they find that those officials who succeeded

at checking local population growth, by which we mean imposing the

one child policy successfully, had a better chance of getting promoted than those that didn't.

...