The New Republic: IS CHINA'S ECONOMIC BOOM A MYTH?
Minxin Pei, a China scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, estimates that corruption costs China as much as 8 percent of annual GDP. The government auditing body has admitted that more than two-thirds of the biggest Chinese companies falsify their accounting--an astonishing statistic given that investors attacked U.S. stock markets in the wake of this year's corporate scandals, even though most economists believe less than 5 percent of American companies cook their books.
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