Restaurant searches, rail traffic: New data sets to gauge Indian economy

There are other metrics too, such as e-way bills, mobility measures and power generation, all of which are used to support the national accounts figures, not replace them

Li Keqiang, then Chinese Communist Party Committee secretary of Liaoning, had told a US ambassador in 2007 that the GDP figures in Liaoning were unreliable and that he himself used three other indicators: the railway cargo volume, electricity consumption and loans disbursed by banks to gauge real performance of the economy, according to a State Department memo released by WikiLeaks.

Li is now the country's premier. Later The Economist created the Li Keqiang index or Keqiang index using these three indicators as better economic indicators of the Chinese economy than official numbers of GDP.

However, just three parameters are not enough to