Productivity Growth, Factors Reallocation And China's Economic Growth

The development of theory and practice from quantity-type growth to quality-type growth in developed countries has gone through about200years. In China, in the past30years of economic reforms and transition, the traditional extensive mode of economic growth was more and more largely restricted by resources and environment with the economic aggregate being enlarged rapidly. Based on this, the study of the economic growth quality began to draw much attention, which focuses on how to change the source of the economic growth and how to obtain sustainable development. Traditionally, growth theory focused on the amount of the investment of production element, while new growth theory attaches importance to the improvement of production factors efficiency, including human capital, technology advancement and factor allocation efficiency. Generally speaking, the greater role production factor efficiency plays in economic growth, the less it depends on traditional production factors. Thus, the quality of economic growth will be improved and the long-term sustainable growth will be achieved.The new economic growth theory shows that scientific and technological progress, endogenous growth and the adjustment of the industrial structure are the means to improve the production efficiency. The former two function by improving entire essential factor productivity, and the latter by factors allocation. According to these two clues, this paper conducts an empirical research on the present condition of China's growth quality of national economy sectors, and on the basis of it the author puts forward some practical suggestions to improve our country's economic growth quality taking developed countries'lessons and China's specific situation into consideration.Based on correlative theory, adopted the cross-industry panel data of China, the author calculates the TFP of China's three macroeconomic sectors and green TFP of18manufacturing sectors during the period of1999-2009and on the basis of the results, proves the contribution of labor, capital factors input TFP growth to economic growth. The findings are as follows:(a) the increase of our whole economy is due to the first and second industry.(b) the contrast of manufacturing sectors shows that in most sectors, production factors input, especially the capital input contributes more to the increase of output.(c) time-interval measurement results show that since the reform and opening-up, capital input contributes most to the economic growth, whose contributory rate is47.8%, and in recent ten years, has gone as high as60%. The contribution of labor input was once the highest and then began to decline. And the contribution of TFP averages38.4%, which had a rising tendency from1978to2000, reached the summit in the1990s and then declined and there is a obvious declining trend in recent years. All this demonstrates that our economic growth depends more and more on capital input and the function of technology advancement is worrying. It is a fact that our economic growth is still element investment-driven growth with low quality.The paper more tests and calculates the allocation efficiency of labor and capital elements among industries and the contributive effect of productivity growth and elements allocation on our country's economic growth. The findings are as follows:(a)seeing the economy as a whole, labor power structure has a weak positive effect on the productivity growth, while capital reallocation has a negative one.(b)in industrial sector, the structural change of capital and labor has a negative effect on the productivity growth. The results display there are many problems in our country's industrial restructuring. As the important source of productivity growth, factors reallocation and structural transformation have not promoted the improvement of economic growth quality.All of the problems prove the great potential of achieving strategic adjustment of economic structure by optimizing and upgrading the industrial structure and changing economy growth mode by means of technology advancement. We can continue to play the positive role of technology advancement and industrial structure changes in promoting our country's economic growth quality by innovating systems, developing structurally reasonable and high-quality personnel resource, advancing technology and industrializing high-tech, as well as cultivating the emerging strategic leading industry.