“China’s customs administration said every dollar of trade is documented, defending the quality of export data that analysts at UBS AG and Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. said may fail to capture the true picture.
“Customs import and export statistics are based upon actual customs declarations,” the General Administration of Customs said today in an e-mailed statement, responding to questions submitted by Bloomberg News on Jan. 11. “In our published export and import data, every dollar has a corresponding customs declaration document to back it.”
Last week’s customs report showing export growth of 14.1 percent in December from a year earlier, after a 2.9 percent gain in November, spurred skepticism from economists at banks including UBS, which cited discrepancies with other nations’ imports from China. Smaller trade gains could signal a less robust recovery from a seven-quarter slowdown.
“It is possible that local governments may have tried to boost exports data by either making round trips in special trade zones” or by exporting “earlier than otherwise in an attempt to improve the annual exports data,” Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Beijing-based economists Yu Song and Yin Zhang wrote in a Jan. 10 note. “Having said that, there is no concrete evidence to suggest this is what actually happened.”
Goldman Sachs and ANZ also cited a divergence from overseas orders in a manufacturing index, while Mizuho Securities Asia Ltd. said the increase could indicate exporters’ rush to finish year-end orders and government pressure to report exports before the end of the year to reach the official 2012 target of 10 percent growth….”
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