China's Housing-Service Revision: Reconciling Official Statistics and International Productivity Databases

Productivity Research Notes (PRN Series), No. 2614.
China's 2023 GDP revision, released following the Fifth National Economic Census, raised nominal GDP by 2.7 percent, with a substantial share arising from the adoption of a rental-equivalence approach for owner-occupied housing services. While this change moves China's national accounts closer to international standards, important measurement issues remain. Since 2022, the APO Productivity Database (APO-PDB) has incorporated explicit housing-service adjustments for China. This note discusses how these adjustments can be reconciled with the revised official statistics and explains the treatment adopted in APO-PDB 2026 to maintain cross-country comparability.