China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced Wednesday that it is changing the way it calculates quarterly gross domestic product figures to better reflect more short-term changes in the Chinese economy. China has long been suspected of politically manipulating its reported economic figures, so the accuracy of China’s GDP figures has always been questionable. Most recently, China’s reported growth of 7 percent in the second quarter of 2015 has come under question, with most analysts believing the true figure might have been lower.

China has been making significant strides toward transparency in its statistics reporting and standards, but it is still a developing economy, and many parts of its data collection and analysis institutions are not as well developed as their Western counterparts. Regardless, Beijing is trying to improve the perception of its statistics. This latest push to revamp its data collection, national accounts calculations and data dissemination standards serves dual purposes.

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