(Bloomberg) --
A Chinese securities brokerage retracted an analyst report Monday that put the country's real jobless rate above 20%, far in excess of the official gauge.
As many as 70 million people could have lost their jobs due to the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, translating into an actual unemployment rate of around 20.5%, a group of three analysts from Shandong-based Zhongtai Securities wrote in a report dated April 24.
The surge in unemployment was due to the outsize impact of the pandemic on services and small businesses, which provide the bulk of job opportunities, they said.
The official surveyed jobless rate was 5.9% in March, down from the record-high of 6.2% in the first two months of the year, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics. The reading has been moving in a tight range of around 5% since the series was first introduced in 2016.
“The urban surveyed unemployment rate is obviously flawed in depicting the unemployment situation, because of China's special condition that there is a very large group of migrant workers and that the urban surveyed unemployment rate couldn't truly reflect the employment situation of migrant workers,” they wrote.
It's rare in mainland China for economists to critique the official job data, a topic of high political sensitivity to the Communist Party leadership.
China Faces Worst Job Market in 20 Years as Growth Slumps: UBS
The report became inaccessible on social media Monday. One of the report's authors, Zhang Chen, said by phone that it had been retracted.
“Zhongtai's attitude is that we should go by the official figures for unemployment,” Zhang said.
There were about 50 million fewer working migrant workers in the first quarter compared to last year, part of whom were not included in the survey, according to the 11-page original report.
©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
With assistance from Bloomberg
Essential Business Intelligence, Continuous LIVE TV, Sharp Market Insights, Practical Personal Finance Advice and Latest Stories — On NDTV Profit.
