This is John Bachelor speaking to colleague Anne Stevenson Yang, the author of the new book Wild Ride, The Rise, The Improvable Rise and sudden fall of the Chinese economy, the miracle, about unemployment numbers. Why we don't

get reliable or any employment numbers out of China. It's said to be going through a

bad patch or a recession.

Employment numbers are a way to follow the recovery.

You bottom out and then you climb back

and the economy gets stronger.

But, as Anne explains, not for the People's Republic of China, with all their metrics, not employment numbers.

Why not?

Or the one we get is exceedingly unbelievable.

I know why.

Here's Anne Stevenson Yang more of this later this week.

Well they've never given it out.

They had a survey-based number for youth unemployment.

That's people who are 16 to 24 who are seeking a job, and that number got up over 20%,

so they decided not to publish it anymore.

The unemployment number generally is very, very unreliable.

It's based on a certain number of people who are working,

but it doesn't tell you how many people there are

in the workforce or how many people are looking for work and it's been you know

criticized for being a ridiculously unvolatile you know stable number I think the

IMF had a paper on this about about 10 years ago about how China's number never ever fluctuates and everybody else's does.