Preface
Caution
Many of the Chinese statistics relating to price must be treated with caution. Prices often have little relation to production costs - and many, unofficially produced, items are probably missed from the accounts. While official per capita incomes are about US$ 370 per year, many rents are only US$ 3.00 per month, no taxes are deducted and the workers enjoy many social benefits. Government pricing policy (see Appendices A and C) has distorted the statistics on income, GDP, GNP etc.
One way of determining a more realistic value for incomes is to adjust the value of inputs to international prices - a potential flaw in this method is, however, that Chinese products are often of much lower quality than their western counterparts. Because of these ambiguities, different studies relying on this technique have come up with widely varying estimates of China's wealth. One World Bank study has estimated that, in terms of purchasing power, China's per capita income in 1990 may have been about US$ 1,950 per capita. China's statistics on life expectancy, average food calories and Kilowatts of electricity consumed per person are consistent with other countries that have average incomes in the region of US$ 750 to 1,250 per year.
Although there is much doubt concerning the absolute value of many price related statistics there is, however, less concern about the trends they show.
Data Used to Support Reviews
The data used to support the reviews contained in this report are contained in the Consultants' computerised data base, which has been separately provided to the Client. A brief guide to this data is provided in Appendix K.
Much data in Chinese statistical reviews is given in 1980 or 1990 constant price terms. The official conversion factor is 1.511.
Contents
This executive summary is divided into three main sections :
(a)
introduction;
(b)
China's price statistics may, therefore, be an underestimate by a factor upwards of three.
(c)
final development profile
main study conclusions and strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to continued development in Guangdong; and
¡
Land taken out of agricultural use and being prepared for development