Events

Prof. Yifan Zhang
Professor
The Chinese University of Hong Kong

The annual survey of industrial firms by China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) is the key data source for empirical analysis of China’s manufacturing sector, especially for years from 1998 to 2007. Data are available through 2013. However, its use has been limited by missing information on key variables, e.g. value-added and intermediate inputs, and concerns of data manipulation. The annual survey of firms conducted by China’s State Taxation Administration (STA) provides an alternative source of firm-level information, including data on value-added and intermediates, for years from 2007 to 2013. Since the STA survey sample is not representative and the precise sampling scheme (observation weight) is unknown, it cannot be used directly to draw inferences on China’s manufacturing sector. By comparing the joint distribution of key variables for which both sources provide reasonably reliable information, we recover the sampling scheme of the STA survey and use it to simulate samples for 2007 to 2013 that are comparable to the NBS sample in the early years. TFP estimates based on the simulated samples suggest a universal slowdown in total factor productivity in the latter period.