China is considering setting up a national bureau of economic investigation in another move to boost the accuracy of statistics and strengthen macroeconomic controls.

The new agency would be directly under the State Council, the cabinet, and independent of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), said a report on the National Development and Reform Commission's China Economic Information Centre website.

It quoted a department head and a spokesman from the bureau as saying the proposal was under discussion.

"The central government will set up a new national bureau for economic investigation, and the State Council will be directly in charge of economic investigations," said the deputy head of the provincial statistics bureau.

Directly under the national agency will be provincial bureaus across the country.

Amid suspicion that regional officials distort information, the central government last week said it would strip provincial governments of the power to issue key economic statistics.

The report said the setting up of the investigation bureau would have a more fundamental impact on the reform of the statistical system than last week's move, adding that a "statistics storm" was on the horizon.

Overseas critics have suggested that politics lies behind the inaccuracy of regional economic data because local officials want to inflate their political achievements by distorting figures.

Several local departments have been found guilty of violating national statistics laws. Beijing recently announced a list of 30 government departments, institutions and enterprises which had broken the law by refusing to provide data or by giving false figures.

The NBS currently calculates the country's quarterly and annual gross domestic product growth rates based on figures provided by provincial governments. It also has 200,000 investigators to collect data nationwide.

It is believed the NBS investigators will be transferred to the new bureau.

The provincial statistics bureaus and their staff are under the dual administration of central and provincial governments, but provincial investigation bureaus will be solely administered by the national agency, reducing local governments' influence in the gathering of statistics.

The NBS' main task is to collect key statistics, but the new agency will have a broader remit. It might investigate local governments' implementation of politically sensitive central economic policies, such as price controls in rural areas.

(Xinhua News Agency, CRI via China Daily December 28, 2004)