The Japanese government admits to falsely reporting data! Kishida Fumio: Unfortunately

"It is a pity that this happened," Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio said on the 15th, "the government will study as soon as possible what measures can be taken to avoid the recurrence of such incidents." ”

According to Reuters, Kishida Fumio admitted at a meeting of the Japanese Diet on the 15th that the Japanese government has exaggerated the construction order data for many years, which may lead to an inflated Japanese GDP data.

Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Tetsuo Saito also confirmed the misreporting of data at the meeting, saying it was "extremely regrettable."

Kishida added that since January 2020, "improvements" have been made to the construction orders data, with no direct impact on the GDP data for fiscal years 2020 and 2021.

According to the Asahi Shimbun, when the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism conducts a survey, it collects monthly order data from construction companies through local governments. This data aggregates public and private construction orders and is one of the data for calculating GDP. In fiscal 2020, the total order volume was about 80 trillion yen.

Since 2013, Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism has been "rewriting" data received from about 12,000 designated companies every month, and about 10,000 pieces of data every year.

Specifically, companies that delay submitting order data tend to submit data for several months at once. At this time, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism instructed the local government to consolidate the orders of these months and rewrite them into the order data of the most recent month.

At the same time, even if the construction company does not submit the data on time for the month, the order quantity is not recorded as 0, but is recorded as the average of the companies that submitted data in the same month. This resulted in the order quantity being double-counted.

It is unclear why the Japanese government misreported this data or how it affected Japan's domestic GDP.

Asahi Shimbun pointed out that this practice of rewriting the data continued until March this year, which may violate Japan's statistics law.

(Original title: The Japanese government admits to falsely reporting data)

Source: Governor of Chang'an Avenue

Process Edit: TF021