While country A’s import from country B should be equal to the
export from country B to country A, statistics from different
countries do not always perfectly confirm each other.  That is
understandable, of course, as there could be differences in how
things are counted.   In the China case, the difference itself
is not what interests us for the moment.   We were digging into
the data from the FRED, Eurostat, and China Customs. 
Unsurprisingly, China’s exports to the other two economies as
per China’s data are wildly different from those imports data
reported by the US and the European Union.  The chart below, for
instance, shows the difference between data from China and the
US.  But that does not really concern us.  china imports exports
Source: China’s Custom, FRED  What is more interesting is the
discrepancies between European data and Chinese data.  Imports
from China by the European Union has fallen very significantly
this year.  Although not as bad as 2009 (yet), the decline this
year is quite signifi