Reassessing China's livestock statistics: An analysis of discrepancies and the creation of new data series

The overall goal of this article is to understand the discrepancies in China's official livestock production and consumption data, to provide two adjusted series for production and consumption, and to show how these new series are internally consistent. We also will examine the implications of using our adjusted data series to assess China's livestock performance and the impact of exogenous policy shocks on the economy. We will show that the nature of the contours of meat production and consumption data significantly affect the results of supply, demand, and trade analyses, especially as they relate to predicted outcomes in the livestock economy and agricultural trade. To meet these goals, our article is organized as follows. In the next section, after discussing criteria that can be used to assess the consistency and quality of livestock data, we show the discrepancies between China's livestock demand and supply and demonstrate that these two series are internally inconsistent. In Section III, we introduce the data that are used for our adjustments. In Sections IV and V, we discuss at length the assumptions and strategy that we use to create our adjusted data series and present our adjusted demand and supply series. We will use a series of statistical tests to track the magnitude of the discrepancies and the effectiveness of the adjusted series in narrowing the gap between supply and demand. In the final sections, we assess the quality of the adjusted series to see the implication for China's cereal trade using the adjusted series versus that of other series and draw our final conclusions. © 2004 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.