Comment by mannyv

Lot of data is "fake."

I remember my political economy prof talking about when he was in the Prime Minister's office of some African country and they were "estimating" the GDP numbers for the OECD.

Collecting statistics is hard when your basic systems don't function well and there are plenty of incentives for "optimistic projections." And in many countries statistics collection doesn't occur or are inaccurate because cheating is rampant. I mean, why tell the government your income when they're just going to tax you on it?

You can see that in the US' import values. Everyone who imports knows that you can ask the shipper to fudge the invoiced amounts so the importer pays less in customs fees/taxes. The assumption by the statistics people is that it all "averages out." But they have no way to prove that assumption. And it's well known that transfer pricing is a total fantasy.

So - lots of numbers are fake. In the West fewer numbers are fake, probably.