Study On The Role Of The Total Factor Productivity: Evidence From Provinces In China

Since the reform and open policy, China's economy has obtained great achievement. But following the overall economy level rising, the gap of inter-provincial economy level among east, center and west also assumes to expand, which already became the research focus. Most of the existing researches on the Chinese ragional disparity are mainly from total quantity to see about influences of material capital, human capital as well as technology progress and so on. But as to the causation of disparity of inter-provincial development level, the existing researches obtain the conclusion that the material capital is the main contribution, some think the human capital's contribution is greater, some think the policy or globalization decide the procedure, some scholar's conclusions think the contribution of total factor productivity containing more widespread content maybe greater than others. Obviously, there is no a compellent or consistent conclusion on this question. According to the overseas researches, this paper proposes a hypothesis needed to be tested, which namely the causation of difference of Chinese inter-provincial development is not the factor accumulation, but the productivity. From this point, the change of productivity will decide the regional growth level's convergence or divergence. But which characteristics then provincial productivity growth does present among the regions? And what made the Chinese inter-provincial productivity difference? There are no further researches on the issue in existing literatures. This paper attempts to make up the flaws of the domestic similar researches and provides an empirical support for solving the regional development difference from the relationship between the total factor productivity and Chinese regional disparity.Based on the economic growth theory and productivity theory, this paper makes the total factor productivity(abbreviation "productivity") to be the research object, taking the Chinese regional development difference as the research beginning, analyzing regional development disparity is from resource(material capital, human capital) difference or the TFP from the total quantity analysis. After confirming the differences of productivity and growth causing the income disparity, the paper decomposes the productivity growth into two major components in the further research: the technical efficiency improvement and the technology progress, and judges which of two is the leading strength in the productivity growth. Thereafter, based on the theory of productivity convergence, this paper analyzes the convergence of divergence of productivity, compares it with provincial income (GDP per worker), and examines the degree of the convergence or divergence of productivity working on income. This paper also studies the determinants of productivity growth, such as human capital, degree of trade openness, foreign direct investment, regional development strategy, investment and deposit, and so on. Finally, we receive some conclusions of this dissertation and produce some policy implications.According to more than 50 years long-term macroeconomic provincial data and using the traditional growth accounting method and the non-parameter method, through the theory analysis and the empirical test, some main conclusions about this paper are as follows:(1) After using the new decomposition method, no matter the Gini coefficient or the Theil index and their decompositions, the regional gap is also in a high level,...