Analysis | Complications in CNY visitor arrivals make data unreliable

There are two sets of figures thrown about for the number of visitors during the Chinese New Year week, one of the two most lucrative holidays in the Macau calendar.

First, there are the actual figures for the first week of the Chinese New Year, starting with the first day of the lunar month and ending on the seventh day, based on data collected by Macau immigration authorities and published approximately a month after the festive holiday.

Then there are preliminary figures provided by the Public Security Police Force (PSP) to the Macau Government Tourism Office (MGTO) for the so-called ‘golden week’, which extends usually – but not always – from the day before Chinese New Year until the sixth day of the New Year. These figures are published just as the golden week concludes.

The two sets of figures are somewhat in consensus, in that they agree that between 800,000 and 1 million tourists visit the city every Chinese New Year. But a significant discrepancy exists nonetheless, amounting to several percentage points.

In this context, recent government statements boasting a 6.3 percent year-on-year rise in tourist arrivals should be read carefully.

URGENCY VS

TRANSPARENCY

These figures are problematic for several reasons, but mostly because they lack transparency and produce distorted impressions of Macau’s tourism market. Given that revisions to the preliminary figures are rarely – if ever – published, the public is left with inaccurate and outdated information, even several months later.

Furthermore, this inaccuracy is in one way or another carried forward to the following year when the revised figure is used as a point of comparison instead of the preliminary figures published earlier. 

To justify its publication of the preliminary figures instead of waiting several weeks for the revised data, MGTO emphasizes the urgency of the matter given the importance of the tourism sector to the overall health of Macau’s economy.

“The reason why MGTO releases provisional figures [on] exceptional occasions like the Chinese New Year golden week, on a daily basis at its website and [in] a final press release, is because the Office knows that the public wants to know the numbers at an earlier stage,” the government bureau told the Times last month.

However, this justification is contradicted by the fact that public revisions to the preliminary data are a very rare occurrence in Macau.

Why the preliminary figures even exist remains a mystery.

In email correspondence with the Times, three Macau government departments were unable to explain why the preliminary figures differ from the final figures released some weeks later.

All figures are provided by the PSP to the relevant government departments and presumably collected electronically by a system that is able to distinguish tourists from non-resident workers, if it is able to do so just several weeks later.

Both MGTO and the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC) referred the Times to the PSP. The PSP suggested the Times should contact MGTO.

To their credit, MGTO has somewhat improved the transparency of their reporting. Last year, the bureau began to align its reporting with international standards set out by the World Tourism Organization; for the first time, it did not include non-
resident workers and foreign students in the Macau SAR in the official tourist arrival figures.

According to the tourism authority, this was made possible after a 2016 enhancement of immigration systems that granted the PSP the ability to distinguish tourists from other so-called ‘visitors’.

SOFTEN THE BLOW

The difference between the preliminary and actual figures sometimes amounts to several percentage points. From 2014 to 2018, the preliminary figure was higher than that of the actual figure every year, with the margin of error ranging from 0.5 percent in 2018 to 4.1 percent in 2015.

Accordingly, the Times concluded in an article last month that at least one government department was deliberately inflating the ‘preliminary’ figures, both exaggerating the increase and softening the blow of lower-than-expected growth.

Each year, the inflated estimate is compared with the previous year’s revised number, which is always lower than the previous year’s estimate. This gives the impression of exaggerated growth.

In a recent note to the Times, MGTO protested that the figures were “neither ‘estimations’, ‘forecasts’ nor ‘predictions’. […] The data released by MGTO are ‘preliminary’ or ‘provisional’ figures [… and therefore] not ‘overstated’ or ‘inflated’.”

But the public remains unaware of the misinformation – deliberate or otherwise – because, again, the figures are not consistently revised or even stated as revised in the following year’s statement. Each year refers only to “the corresponding occasion last year.”

In last month’s report, the Times predicted that the actual growth in visitors during the 2018 Chinese New Year period was likely to fall below the advertised 6.3 percent.

It did fall below the 6.3 percent estimate, but not by much. According to the final data provided by the PSP, the 2018 Chinese New Year period (counted as per MGTO’s date range) welcomed 958,545 visitors, or an actual growth of about 5.9 percent over “the corresponding occasion last year.”

In 2017, the discrepancy between the growth in the published preliminary figures (9.9 percent) and the unpublished revised figures (6.3 percent) was more problematic. The same was true in 2015, when the preliminary data showed an optimistic 2.4 percent contraction instead of the actual 6.5 percent contraction.

No revision of the 2018 data has yet been published on the government news portal despite the final figures having been available since March 23.

BAD NEWS IS NO NEWS

Public departments sometimes refrain from publishing official statements when there is dissapointing growth to report, especially when the number of visitors for a given period declines. No publicity is good publicity when things aren’t going all that well.

One recent example was the Easter holiday at the start of April, for which the PSP attached a file to the government news portal without an accompanying statement.

For the four-day period from March 30 to April 2, the number of visitors to the Macau SAR dropped 4.72 percent to 402,846 compared to the same period in the previous year.

Again, there is some uncertainty in the data as it is unclear whether the point of comparison from last year is the period of March 30 to April 2 or the actual four-day Easter holiday, which fell between April 14 and 17 in 2017.

According to the PSP’s official data last year, Macau registered 427,254 tourist arrivals in the 2017 Easter period. That would represent an actual decline of 5.71 percent and not 4.72 percent.

Interestingly, according to the PSP’s official data, tourists accounted for just 40 percent of the 1 million-plus “arrivals” recorded at Macau’s border checkpoints during Easter this year.