An Empirical Study Of China's Economic Growth Under Open Conditions

The thesis focuses on empirics of economic growth in China during reform era. Since the reform and opening up, China has been keeping high growth rate, meanwhile some new economy phenomena appear and economy structure change continuously and dramatically. Empirical analysis, which can make the complexity of the economy phenomena simpler, is a sort of confirmation about the economy facts.Accompanied with the high rate of economic growth, china is experiencing her transition process and deepening her level of opening up gradually. Thus there must be lots of different characteristics of economic growth in China from the developed countries and the other developing countries. Theory is necessary for china's reform. The nature of any scientific theory is a hypothesis, and the falsiflablity of a theory is the symbol of scientific basis and the precondition of theoretical development. Once a theory can not be certified or be supported by facts, the theory will obtain more value to direct the corresponding practice; otherwise an alternative theory should be developed. Thus, whether the theories originated from western developed countries and experiences of the other developing countries can be suitable for the analyses on the economy practices of China indeed depends on some related empirical studies . Therefore, empirical analysis on economy growth in China plays a key role in deepening the reform and keeping China's sustainable growth.In addition, due to clarifying the nature of complicated economy phenomena, empirical analysis is helpful to develop alternative theory, which means arguable empirical analysis is one of starting points to construct economic theory that can guide directly economy practice in China. All of these kinds of empirical analyses are a sort of re-analysis on economy phenomena on the basis of principles of economics. When different phenomena are studied with some old principles or methods, the old principles or methods will be modified unconsciously or consciously, so the analysis is also a process of innovation itself.Due to the complexity of economy phenomena, the interaction of human behaviors, and the un-experimental nature of economy, the process of empirical analysis is full of challenges. Unlike the theoretical study of economics which focuses on the development of new theories, empirical analyses focus on testing the fact. Although there are various methods of statistics and econometrics that can be selected by an economist, the empirical analysis is still a typical interesting study program which is characterized by the combination of theory and facts.To sum up, with the basic framework of economics, the paper makes studies of the key phenomena of economy growth in China, and focuses on the empirical analyses in related fields. The paper firstly starts the analysis with the convergence across the growth of provinces in China. Secondly, the relationships with foreign economy are studied, which include foreign trade and foreign direct investment. Thirdly, the focuses are on the technology progress and technology structure of China economy. Finally, the role of government in the economy development is examined empirically with a sample from High Performance Asian Economies except Japan (HPAEs). The main content and the contributions of each chapter are in the following:Chapter 2 is a survey of economic growth theory and empirics, which is a preparation for the following studies in this paper. Chapter 3 is an empirical analysis of convergence of economy growth across provinces in China. With the economy growth data sampled from provinces of China during the reform era, the convergence of economy growth is analyzed empirically, from which a conclusion is drawn: the divergence of economy growth across provinces of China mainly results from the divergence of the steady paths of economy growth.The chapter 4 and 5 are about the foreign relation of Chinese economy growth. Chapter 4 is the analysis on the volume of foreign trade of China in term of trade dependence. The trade dependence is related with the stages of economy development in this chapter, and the rule of thumb is drawn from the experiences of most countries, that the trade dependence will show an inverse U shape with the change of stages of development. Based on the rule, we can conclude that the trade dependence of China is not too high now.Chapter 5 is an Empirical analysis on the determinants and mechanism of foreign direct investment in China. Based on some researches home and abroad, taking China as a whole and distinguishing FDI's home countries, the paper makes an empirical analysis on the effects of several determinants on Foreign Direct Investment and its mechanism in China by Panel Data model and Granger causality test.Chapter 6 focuses on the technology progress and technology structure of Chinese economy. Based on some literatures, a measure index is improved significantly, which can be used to measure the technology progress happened in trade sector. In addition, a series of methods are designed to measure the distribution of technology.The methods are also applied practically to trade sectors of China, and from the view of international comparison, the chapter also gets some conclusions: during the reform era, the technology level of China's exports has been obviously increased, but it has not converged to the level of world; China's level of technology structure wasn't improved significantly, but had different performances during different periods; the changing of technology structure of China's exports has unique characteristics.The fundamental hypothesis of the measurement in this paper is just that the countries of high income level would export products of high technology level and the countries of low income level would export products of low technology level. Thus this measurement to some degree is free of the difficulty of measure technology progress under new classical equilibrium framework. Meanwhile, the calculation of the measure index is just based on the data set of export and income per capita of countries in the world, which endow them with perfect operation. This measurement is a first of important contributions of this paper.Chapter 7 devotes to identifying whether the technology structure of China's economy is too high or too low. The idea of appropriate technology in growth theory is applied to analyze the level of technology structure, and two indexes are developed to measure the appropriateness of technology structure, which are named as appropriateness index and biasness index of technology structure respectively. By applying the two indexes to an analysis of China's economy, some important conclusions are drawn: the technology structure of China's economy changed dramatically in 1996 or so, and before 1996, the technology structure was higher than the appropriate level, but was lower than the appropriate level after 1996.With the two indexes, the analysis on technology structure can be done by a totally different view, and get more valuable conclusions. In addition, the two indexes can also be used to measure the intensity of government's intervention in economy, which is a necessary preparation for related studies. The two indexes are a second of important contributions in this paper.In Chapter 8 the role of government in the development is analyzed empirically with the samples of HPAEs. By the empirical analysis, the point that the intervention of government has a positive effect on economy growth performance is supported.The total effect of government on economy growth has always been a controversial topic. Due to lack of measure index of government intervention, most of literatures trend to protest the failure of government intervention. The study in this chapter finds out the evidence for the opposite points, which will inspire advanced studies in this field. This is a third of important contributions in this paper.