China will release gross domestic product figures for the fourth quarter of 2015 on Tuesday amid rising concern about the health of the country’s economy — which in turn has reverberated through global markets.
China’s economy grew 6.9 per cent in real terms in the first three quarters, official data show. That is in line with the government’s full-year target of “around 7 per cent” but would be the slowest full-year growth since 1990. Here are five things to look for in Tuesday’s numbers:
Nominal growth. Suspicion surrounds China’s “GDP deflator”, the inflation gauge used to convert nominal GDP into the politically sensitive real GDP growth rate. The GDP deflator should be the broadest measures of inflation, capturing price changes for all goods and services, including non-consumption goods. But if the fourth-quarter deflator diverges sharply from more familiar gauges of Chinese inflation, investors will suspect that China’s stats bureau is cooking the books and look to nominal growth as a more reliable indicator of the state of the economy.