Reconciling Chinese meat production and consumption data

The apparent inconsistencies in the published statistics for China's livestock sector raise questions about the validity of the underlying data. The purpose of this article is to illustrate the seriousness of this data problem and to provide a preliminary assessment of the magnitude of the discrepancies. We also consider the implications of using published statistics as the basis for research in China's livestock sector. In Section I, we take a closer look at the survey and aggregate production data, pointing out stylized facts and potential sources for the apparent discrepancies. We use the stylized facts, in Section II, to construct two alternative tivedata sets that may lie closer to actual production and consumption levels. In Section III, we discuss the potential impact of inaccuracies in China's livestock statistics on projections of China's feed use and future meat and grain trade. In Section IV, we present our conclusions.