A Research Of Chinese Economic Growth Drag Caused By Land

Since reform and opening-up, the Chinese economy has maintained more than 20 years fast growth. Following with the socio-economic development, people have more and more demand to land utilization space and land product. Because the natural supplies of land resources are limited, the unbalanced situation between the scarce of land supplement and the growth of social-economy demand, the limited land resources have already become a restriction factor of long-term economic growth in China. According to the assumption of Romer model (2001), owing to the limitation of land resources, no country can avoid the influence of "growth drag". So it is strategic significance to measure the "growth drag" according to the character of land resources of China. Meanwhile, strengthen the theory research of land resources-restriction is practical significance to overcome land resources bottleneck.After combing the literature, we discovered that the representative literature integrating land into the analysis frame of a complete production function is very limited. We can use the "growth drag" of Romer (2001) as the research method to measure the impaction of land resources limitation to economic growth. To keep the analysis manageable, the former researches started with the case of Cobb-Douglas production function, in which the elasticity of substitution among these factors is 1. But the hypothese is not true in the real economy world. So we choose the modified two-level CES production function as the basic model to study the "growth drag" of land resources. Meanwhile, the thesis modify the hypothese of former research and gives three hypotheses of "land resources restriction", which are "the quantity of land resources is fixed","the scarce of land resources is more stern ","the scarce of land resources is more alleviation". Based on the modified two-level CES production function, we get the equations of "growth drag".Following with the determination of study range, we take 1985-2005 as the time series, and study on the country level and province level. Then we begin to deal with the data, in this part, the thesis make some statistics and economic definition about the variable of Y, K, L, T, and define the data of land resources as the whole land except the unused land.In the empirical study of country level, the thesis carries on parameter estimation according to the econometrics methods absolutely. After testing the stationary and co-integration, the thesis use the OLS to estimate the parameters first, but the serious multicollinearity between variables violates the basic hypothese. then we use the ridge regression method to overcome the multicollinearity. Finally, based on the hypothese 3, we get the growlh drag. The results indicated that the growth drag of China was 0.007512 annually.In the empirical study of province level, according to the same logic as country level, the thesis calculates the "growth drag" of each province. Methods of spatial autocorrelation indicators were employed to analysis the spatial correlates of "growth drag" of provinces. The results indicate that "the impaction degree of land resources limitation to economic growth" showed obvious spatial cluster pattern; the spatial clusters and outliers showed definite rules; "the impaction degree of land resources limitation to economic growth" showed obvious local spatial disparity pattern.Finally, based on the theory analysis and empirical study, the thesis offer some choice to alleviation the impaction of land resources limitation to economic growth, which is land readjustment, substitute of capital and technique to the land resources and important province control. Those policy choices indicate that if we insist the land resources protection policy, China will be on a balanced growth path in the future.