TOKYO (Reuters) -- The Japanese government overstated construction orders data received from the industry for years, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on Wednesday, in a practice that may have had the effect of inflating the country's economic growth figures.
Kishida made the comment in a parliamentary session after an Asahi newspaper report that the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism had been "rewriting" data received from about 12,000 select companies since 2013 at a pace of about 10,000 entries per year.
