The Quality Of Economic Growth: A Theoretical Explanation And Empirical Analysis In China

During the development of economic growth theory, most studies have put the quantity of growth as the full content of economic growth, but never consider the quality of economic growth. In the 30 years of China's economic reform, as quantity of economic growth increased rapidly, many problems of quality of economic growth have gradually come out. Based on the logical empiricism, this paper clearly defines quality of economic growth from its extension and intension, then measures it accurately, builds a unified framework of the quality of economic growth.The quality of economic growth refers to the inherent nature and the law of economic growth, including the structure of economic growth, stability of economic growth, welfare distribution, and the cost of resources and the environments. Based on the extension and intension of quality of economic growth, this paper builds the index of quality of economic growth, which constitutes 28 basic indicators. Principal Component Analysis is used here to determine the weight of the target, Additionally, mean value treatment is also used to eliminate the index dimension and covariance matrix of basic indices acts as input variables, as a result ,we can avoid the deviation caused by standardized methods and the correlation coefficient matrix. Measuring results from our study shows that the quality of China's economic growth has been improved to a certain extent in overall level and regional level from 1978 to 2007, but it is very different among the provinces and municipalities.Optimization in the structure of economic growth, enhance the stability of economic growth, improvement in welfare, improvement in efficiency of resource use and ecological environments will contribute to the quality of economic growth. By empirically analyzing Chinese provincial panel data from 1978 to 2007,we find the estimation results of our model is well consistent with the conclusions from theoretical study: the quality index variables of economic growth are significantly positive, furthermore, our results also find the economic growth structure in China's transition period, the economic growth stability, distributions of welfare change achievements, resource utilization and cost of the ecological environment have significantly positive relationships with the quality of economic growth. Though China's economic development has entered a new stage and the quantity of economic growth is in the ever-expanding period, it is still necessary to continuously adjust the structure of economic growth, maintain the stability of economic growth, improve welfare level of economic growth as well as its achievements distributions, and improve the efficiency of utilizing resources and reduce the costs of eco-environments. In short, our final target is to achieve simultaneous progress in the quantity and quality of economic growth, and keep a long-term sustainability of economic development.