Openness And Productivity Growth

Openness to the outside world is a basic national policy in China and an sustaining power giving an impetus to rapid development and institutional transferring of Chinese economy, There are two facets about the openness of large country in area and population: one aspect is the national openness, the other aspect is the regional economic openness. The former belongs to the pure economic internationalization openness, and the latter include dual openness: one is the openness to the other countries, the other is the openness to the other regions in the same country; the former is the regional economy internationalization and the latter is the regional, economy inter-regionalization. The openness in this doctoral dissertation means the international openness. The productivity can often be classified as labor productivity and total factor productivity. There: are much mechanism and channel through which international openness affects productivity growth. Export externality and learning by exporting can also cause the productivity growth. Import is the main transferring channel through which the embodied technology diffusion happens, the competition along with import can incur the technology innovation and efficiency promotion. The externality brought by FDI includes productivity spillovers and market access spillovers that can affect the productivity greatly in both host and home countries. International trade and foreign direct investment can promote the technology progress and productivity growth through learning by doing The resource allocation effect and competition effect is also the important channel affecting the innovation. International openness is an important factor affecting technology progress and productivity, but much empirical analysis has showed that the effect of human capital is even noteworthy.In order to study the effect of international openness on the labor productivity, the author firstly take nature logarithm of labor productivity as dependent variable, import and export dependency ratio, the ratio of FDI to GDP and human capital as independent variables and have an empirical analysis based on the model for panel data Then in order to test the robustness of the empirical results I have a further study by taking the growth rate of labor productivity as dependent variable and keeping the independent variables unchanged. Both of The two analytic results show that: The human capital is the first important positive factor among all the independent variables affecting the labor productivity growth, FDI also have a strong positive impact on the labor productivity and is the second important influencing factor; but the export's positive effect is very weak and almost not existing, and the import's effect on the labor productivity is negative. At the end of chapter 4 some explanation is given on the analytic results.About the effect of the international openness on the technical efficiency, technology progress and TFP growth, the Stochastic Frontier Analysis method is used, the impact of the human capital, international import and export, and FDI is checked quantitatively based on the technical effect model and Maximum Likelihood Estimation. With the estimate result coming from the first analytical step the technical efficiency, technology progress and TFP growth of 28 provinces of our country during 1985-2003 can be calculated, then the effect of the four factors mentioned above on technology progress and TFP growth is checked with these panel data series.In order to test the robustness of the analytical results the Data Envelopment Analysis method is used to recalculate the data series about the technical efficiency, technology progress and TFP growth of 28 provinces in China during this period. With this new data set some empirical analysis is done once again about the effect of the human capital, international import and export, FDI on the technical efficiency, technology progress and TFP growth. The both analytical results based the two data sets calculated from SEA and DEA methods have showed: on the one hand the human capital, export and FDI can promote the technical efficiency, however the effect of the import on the technical efficiency is negative; the negative effect of export on technology progress is slight and import can improve the technology progress to some extent, but the positive effect of FDI is larger than import by far; on the other hand the lagged effect of international import and export and FDI on the technical efficiency and technology progress is insignificant. As far as TFP growth is concerned export have a little negative impact on it and the positive effect of import is also weak, but the human capital and FDI can promote the TFP growth largely, and the synthetic effect of international openness is positive and significant. In chapter 6 some detailed explanation is given on these empirical results.With the data sets about the scale economy obtained from SFA and DEA the effect of international openness on the scale economy is investigated based on the linear regression model. The empirical result has showed that the export from our country doesn't bring the scale effect, however, the import bring a little scale effect and the effect of FDI is insignificant; the synthetic effect of international openness on scale economy is negative. The analysis result based the Probit model confirm the view which can manifest that the empirical conclusion is robust.The theory sense of this doctoral dissertation lies in that on the one hand with the data series of TFP growth and its decomposition obtained by means of SFA and DEA and model for panel data and GAUSS language program used the influence characteristic and extent of human capital, international import and export and FDI on the labor productivity, technical efficiency, technology progress, scale economy and TFP growth is analyzed empirically, on the other hand the robustness of the conclusion is checked and some explanation is also given about the empirical result The practice guidance sense lies in that more investment in education is needed in order to improve the national absorptive capacity of new technology and knowledge, a suitable openness degree is a good choice, more attention should be paid to promote the quality of FDI, the structure of international export should be optimized and the grade and technical extent of international export goods should be improved in order to get more value added. These measures may be the core and direction when some policies concerning the international openness are adjusted.