Human Capital, Technology Progress And Endogenous Economic Growth: Theoretical And Empirical Research

The three magnificent technological revolutions during the global economic development clearly demonstrate the key role of technological change and innovation activities in the long-run economic growth. As a result, the difference in R&D expenditures and innovation efficiency among different countries has been the major research topics for the new growth theories, as Romer and Lucas being the research pioneers. Similarly, although China's economy has experienced a steady rapid growth since its reform and opening-up, certain problems also exist during its economic growth achievements, especially the change of China's economic growth patterns. Therefore, this dissertation attempts to combine those driving forces of long-run economic growth, including technological change, innovation as well as human capital accumulation, to investigate the mechanism of modern economic growth, especially by introducing the role of international trade and foreign investment, to study economic growth in the case of economic opening.This dissertation presents a literature review on the recent development of economic growth theories, especially on the modern economic growth theories. We mainly classify the previous literatures into two types: one based on technological change and the other based on human capital accumulation. We review those papers from the perspectives of both economic growth mechanism and model establishment, and in the meanwhile, we also show our comments on the existent studies. Theoretical researches in this paper first investigates how the government can intervene the economic growth by using fiscal policy. Based on the horizontal R&D-driven endogenous growth model, we show that there is efficiency loss in the decentralized economy due to monopolistic pricing in intermediate goods sector and externality in R&D sector. The forth part establish an endogenous growth model driven by both technological change and human capital accumulation. While the innovation rate is determined by the human capital employment in R&D sector like Romer (1990), the endogenous growth rate of human capital is also determined by the employment in this sector like Lucas (1988). In the meanwhile, the Jones (1995) method has also been adopted in order to overcome the scale effect in Romer's model. By endogenizing both innovation and human capital accumulation, the model shows how long-run economic growth rate essentially depends on both R&D inputs and human capital accumulation. In the next chapter, the role of economic opening and technological imitation are introduced. Once international trade and foreign investment are considered, technological change depends on not only self-innovation, but also technological imitation and absorption, while the latter is determined by the technological absorption capability in the host country. The competitive market solution demonstrates that steady state growth rate is a function of human capital stock, innovation efficiency as well as degree of openness and financial development in the host country, while shows the importance of international trade and technology absorption in long-run economic growth.Empirical research has also been made in the sixth part, by using China's panel data of 29 provinces during the period of 1992～2002. Both import and foreign direct investment are chosen as the major two channels of international technology spillovers. Our estimation results show that for China's regional economic growth, investment rate is the key variable, while R&D input and human capital accumulation also play an important role. As for R&D expenditures, it's found that technology spillover of foreign R&D may play a more important role than domestic R&D, while the spillover effect of foreign direct investment may be more significant than import. The last chapter summarizes the major conclusions of this dissertation, and also discusses the possible extension of future research.