China's top economic planning body has confirmed that China is considering bring local GDP under unified calculation in an effort to prevent local officials from cooking economic growth figures for political benefits.

Discord existed between the sum of provincial GDP figures and the national GDP statistics calculated by the National Bureau of Statistics, the National Development and Reform Commission said in a report to the Standing Committee of the 11th National People's Congress (NPC).

The current GDP calculation mechanism, which asked local governments to calculate their own GDP and reported to the NBS for verification, inevitably led to such a result, the Commission said in the report.

The fundamental solution to solve the problem was to introduce the unified GDP calculation method, the Commission said.

A source with of the NPC Standing Committee told Xinhua on Saturday that the report, concerning the Commission's reply to NPC Standing Committee members opinions on the implementation of the national economic and social development plan, was submitted to the 13th session of the NPC Standing Committee, which ended on Friday.

The Commission said in the report that some local governments inflated their GDP figures as GDP growth was widely used to appraise local officials' performance.

Apart from that, different accounting reference, calculating methods and standards adopted by the national and local statistics departments were also blamed for the statistics unconformity, the Commission said.

To close the gap between NBS figures and local statistics on GDP, the Commission said there was already a system of monthly sample investigation on service industry including wholesales, retail trade, accommodation and catering. Reform to the calculation method of large-scale businesses and industries was also underway.

Means of taxation, power consumption and turnover of commodities have also been employed to assess local GDP figures, according to the Commission.

Ballooned local GDP figures have long been a problem in China.

In the first half of 2009, the sum of provincial GDP figures was 1.4 trillion yuan more than the national figure, calculated by the NBS independently. Almost half of the provincial governments reported a double-digit GDP growth whereas the national growth figure was only 7.1 percent.

(Xinhua News Agency February 28, 2010)