Statistical Misreporting: The View from (Very) High Above

The East Asia Program at the Moynihan Institute presents Minh Duc Trinh from Purdue University. 

Autocrats govern from the top but are dependent on information from below. However, regime agents at lower levels of government who supply this information have both the incentive and capacity to manipulate it, faking government data and statistics to appear more competent and loyal than they really are. This statistical misreporting problem becomes even more pervasive and more consequential in regimes that rely on data and statistics in their decision making, but even regime rulers are unable to tell exactly which of their agents are lying and by how much. A novel method based on nighttime luminosity succeeded in quantifying the degree of statistical misreporting in Vietnam and China, two surviving (and thriving) single-party Communist regimes in Asia. Knowledge about disaggregated misreporting behaviors then shed light on statistical misreporting’s debilitating effects on authoritarian governance.