 Hi, this is Salvatore Bogones and I'm excited to tell you about my latest article on Forbes. This is an article on China's 2017 Provincial GDP Statistics which were quietly released Monday, February 12th with no fanfare as far as I can tell. No news organization even noticed they were out. But I noticed and I quickly wrote up the statistics for Forbes. You can find this article on my Forbes site or the Forbes Asia site and if you have a look at it you'll find that I've broken down China's GDP per capita and real GDP growth rate figures for 2017 by province. This is the first provincial level analysis available anywhere in English. The interesting number is down here at the bottom right where if you add up all of China's province's GDP statistics you find an 8.1% growth rate for China for 2017 but if you look at the data given for the country as a whole it's only a 6.9% growth rate. So the provinces are overstating their growth rates as historically they have. Also if you add up the provincial numbers for GDP per capita you get a GDP per capita of China of $9,794 it converted into US dollars versus $9,311 based on the national data. Now that's no surprise for several years China's provincial GDP statistics have overstated the national figure and the country has made a commitment to bringing those back into line over the next few years. Here you can see I've also produced a map of GDP growth rates by province and the interesting thing here are two of the standout provinces in the western fringe of eastern China and that is Guizhou province kind of in the backyard of Guangdong and Shanxi province kind of in the backyard of Beijing. These two provinces are the only two to grow at greater than 12%. Now even if those statistics are not quite true it does show some of the western Chinese regions growing at faster rates than the eastern coastal cities. Of course other far western Chinese regions like Gansu and Shanghai are growing much more slowly. Notice also that Inner Mongolia has a negative 15% growth rate and that's not a real number that's because it restated its GDP statistics due to accounting irregularities in the past years. Also note the extremely slow growth rates in the Dongbei region of northeastern China that's Liaoning province, Jilin province and Heilongjiang province. North Korea is over here and Russia is here. So these are the provinces that border North Korea and Russia and no surprise that with neighbors like that they have very little opportunity for cross border trade and for growing by connecting to value chains in neighboring countries. The fast growth continues to be in eastern China where in fact the fastest I'm sorry the richest provinces in China are. So these are the Chinese provinces by GDP per capita and you can see the richest places in China are Beijing and Tianshan in the capital region of China surrounded by the much poorer Hubei province. Also the area around Shanghai the Yangtze River Delta and the Pro River Delta Guangdong province near Hong Kong. So these three regions Pro River Delta Yangtze River Delta and now we're starting to call it Jing Jing Ji around the capital region. These three areas are by far the richest areas of China and continue to outpace the rest of China. They're growing at either a similar rate or a faster rate to the country as a whole. Now the overall conclusion I think you can take away from this article is that as GDP growth slows in China it's becoming more and more difficult for those western provinces to catch up to the east. Eastern China is already at a level of GDP per capita that's somewhat similar to that of Taiwan or South Korea or poorer areas of Japan but western China is not catching up to those leading eastern provinces and that's a real problem. We're starting to see the emergence of two China's a set of eastern provinces that are closely integrated into the world economy and northern and western provinces that are really left behind. Now if you'd like to see more of my writing about the Asia Pacific and the world in general you can go to my website at SalvatoreBuglonis.com where you can also sign up for my global Asia newsletter. It's free, it comes out about once a month and it contains a summary of my writing. Of course right now you're on my YouTube channel and I would love for you to subscribe to my YouTube channel where you can also get my weekly live stream show Midnight in America. Hope you'll subscribe and thanks for listening.