“Lies, lies and statistics”!
Or as in Through the Looking Glass:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
Reuters: “The new estimate is one of the key findings of an ambitious project by the OECD think-tank and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to present a truer picture of underlying trade flows in an age of global supply chains when intermediate inputs can cross borders several times during the manufacturing process.
The political purpose of the exercise is to reduce protectionist pressure by demonstrating that governments are shooting themselves in the foot if they raise barriers to imports because, in doing so, they are also hurting their own exporters and competitiveness.
Angel Gurria, secretary-general of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), said the value-added approach challenged the conventional wisdom regarding trade.
“Today, we have to think about goods and services as ‘made in the world’, Gurria said.”
via China trade surplus with U.S. may be a quarter smaller | Reuters.
