Research On The Quality Of Economic Growth In China

Economic growth is the result of accumulation of production factors and improvement of resources utilization or increase of productivity. Accumulation of production factors means increase of quantity of input factors, which is the part of quantity expansion of economic growth. Improvement of resources utilization and increase of productivity means technology improvement and increase of utilization efficiency, which belongs to the part of quality of economic growth. From this point of view, economic growth includes not only the process of quantity expansion but also the process of quality improvement. It is the unity of quantity expansion and quality improvement. Here we define the connotation of economic growth quality from three levels.Firstly, we define economic growth quality from the level of output efficiency.Secondly, we may define the connotation of economic growth quality as product quality from micro level.Thirdly, we may define the connotation of economic growth from the level of sustainable development.Economic growth is determined by input factors such as capital, labors, technology improvement, etc. These factors determine the economic growth from three aspects: the quantity of input factors, the quality of input factors and the combination quality and allocation efficiency of input factors. Economic growth is the unity of quantity expansion and quality improvement, so economic growth quality depends on factors in the end. And the latter two aspects determine the quality of economic growth directly.Besides the factors that determine growth quality like material capital quality, human capital quality and technology improvement, the combination and allocation of various factors can also influence the efficiency of factors, and thus further to influence quality of economic growth indirectly. During real economic activities, the combination and allocation of various resources construct the economy structure, and each state of economy structure represents a combination and allocation state of factors. In this sense, the structure variation effect is the main factor to influence economic growth quality.Economic growth itself finally depends on quantity and efficiency of factors input. When the combination efficiency of factors input is fixed, the input factor has a diminishing marginal productivity, so it need more and more inputs to keep a certain growth rate. But we can raise the marginal return of input factors through technology improvement, and this will increase the total factor productivity (TFP) in the economy system. And the growth based on increase of TFP is of high quality. High-quality economic growth can make up for the excess consumption of resources. From this point, sustainable development is consistent with economic growth.The evaluation theory of economic growth quality must base on its connotation. This paper evaluates the quality of China's economic growth from five aspects as output efficiency, input efficiency, product quality, the rationality of economy running and environment quality. The result of evaluation showed that, the comprehensive evaluation index of growth quality has an ascending trend. However, the quality improvement and quantity expansion are not synchronic, and the increase of quality was far inferior to the expansion of quantity.To see from the variation trend of TFP, China's technology improvement ratio has an ascending trend on the whole during transition period. The growth rate of TFP per year embodies absolute contribution of elements beyond factors input to economic growth. The growth rate of TFP is rather unsteady from transition. Through further research, we find that the increase of TFP and expansion of output scale have no causality on economic meaning. This coincides with the former conclusion that quality improvement is far inferior to quantity expansion and they are not synchronic. It implies that China's growth pattern is an intensive one acquired mainly by expansion of quantity.The quality increase of capital input is part of TFP's increase. Further research manifests that the average contribution ratio of capital's efficiency to economic growth is -2.5846%. That is to say, the change of capital productivity did no contribution to output, and it hampered output on the contrary. After eliminating abnormal data of 1989 and 1990, the average contribution is only 2.4282%. Thus the change of capital productivity played a minor role to the improvement of economic growth quality. So the input efficiency of capital was very low. After eliminating the abnormal data of 1989 and 1990, the average contribution ratio of TFP to economic growth is 19.3618%, and we can count that the contribution ratio of capital quality's improvement to growth rate of TFP is only 12.54%.Production factors will be reallocated through floating between industries. During the process, the industrial structure has changed. And the alteration effectwill lead to optimization and coordination of industrial structure, which will increase the allocation efficiency of production factors and increase the economic growth quality in the end. The relative contribution of industrial structure's adjustment to economic growth is under 5%, and the average value is only 1.45%. It is thus clear that the contribution ratio of industrial structure's adjustment to economic growth is very low from transition. Compared with the data of foreign countries of the same period, the superiority of adjustment has not played much role. Further research showed that the increase of tertiary industry's value would promote economic growth.The analysis of relationship between ownership structure's alteration and growth quality showed that if the non state-owned degree LF increases one unit, the comprehensive evaluation index QI that reflects growth quality will increase 82.6 units. Thus, the higher degree of non state-owned, the more obvious its promotion function to quality of growth. The micro mechanism that alteration of ownership structure promote economic growth quality have manifested that the different ownership of enterprises lead to gaps of efficiency. Compared with state-owned enterprises, non state-owned enterprises have a relatively higher efficiency. That is to say, equal inputs will bring more outputs, which will increase growth quality on macro dimension.The increase of contribution ratio of trade to economic growth does not necessarily mean that growth quality has been improved. The contribution coefficient of importing and exporting reflects the added value ratio of unit product imported or exported. It can be used as the index to evaluate the influence of variation of trade structure to growth quality. The result of measuring stated that the index of contribution ratio reflecting quantity expansion is rising all along, and so the total scale of trade has expanded continuously. However, the index of contribution coefficient that reflects economic growth quality was decreasing in recent years. To synthesize the influence of trade structure to China's economic growth quality we may get that the alteration of trade structure helped to increase GDP, but it didn't promote economic growth quality synchronically.To sum up, the three major factors that influence China's economic growth quality are the input factor quality, the structure running quality and system of organization.Firstly, the input factors include capital and labors. The input efficiency of capital and quality of labors embody qualities of input factors. The trend of index that reflecting capital input efficiency showed that the quality of capital input factor had decreased, which influenced economic growth quality seriously. What's more, the yearly rise of labor productivity was mainly due to the improvement of...