【Promotion Seminar】Deadline Pressure and GDP Overreporting: Evidence from China's Poverty Alleviation Program
2026/04/14
研討會日期 : 2026-04-14
時間 : 10:30
主講人 : Professor Tzu-Ting Yang (楊子霆)
地點 : Conference Room B110
主持人 : Professor Wen-Tai Hsu
演講者簡介 : Dr. Tzu-Ting Yang received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of British Columbia in 2015. He is currently an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica. His research interests are Applied Micro, Labor Economics, Health Economics, and Public Economics.
演講摘要 : This paper examines whether China's 2020 poverty alleviation deadline led to systematic GDP overreporting in poverty-designated counties. We adapt the framework of Martínez (2022), comparing the nighttime light elasticity of GDP between poverty and non-poverty counties before and after the 2011–2012 policy announcement, using a county-level panel covering 2000–2020. We find no differential in the elasticity between the two county types before 2012. After the announcement, poverty counties overstate GDP growth by approximately 21% relative to non-poverty counties—meaning that for every 1% of actual economic growth, official GDP reports about 1.21%. The implied overstatement rises monotonically as the deadline approaches: from about 9% in 2012–2013 to 29% in 2016–2020. After the 2020 deadline passes, the overreporting does not further escalate, suggesting that deadline pressure is a key driver of the manipulation. The overstatement concentrates in government expenditure and investment, not consumption, and is larger in counties with high government fiscal exposure and initially lower income. These results document an unintended consequence of strict deadline-based governance: escalating incentives for local officials to inflate reported economic statistics.
