HONG KONG — News headlines this month proclaimed that Japan is still the world's second-biggest economy, ahead of its neighbor China. Gross domestic product figures for 2009 showed Japan with $5.085 trillion against China's $4.91 trillion.
But every economist knows that there are lies, damned lies and statistics. And these statistics were something of a fluke, were probably untrue in 2009, are certainly untrue now, and don't really matter in terms of the real lives of the people of China or Japan. Nor do they address the difficult questions facing politicians and policymakers.
It is a sad reflection on the quality of the media that all the majors made a big deal of the headline — Japan still ahead of China — and most of them did not get to the fine print: What, if anything, does it actually mean?