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Research About The Effects Of Roads On Labor Productivity And Income Per Capita

Posted on:2009-10-19Degree:DoctorType:Dissertation
Country:ChinaCandidate:Z J YuFull Text:PDF
GTID:1119360275471042Subject:Western economics
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It is easy to find that, in many papers, researchers firmly emphasize the direct intervention behavior on income distribution to solve related problems. It can be called as the direct intervention of"income stock"; and the usual tools are taxes and subsidies. So other possible approaches to solve income distribution problems are relatively ignored. As we know, the direct intervention such as taxes will result in very harmful distortion for the whole market economy. According to these statements, the author tries to find other intervention methodology that can realize both of the requirements: it has valuable effect on income distribution problem-solving; meanwhile, it results in less distortion for the economy.In our opinion, if we pay attention to the process of how income comes from (we call it the intervention of"income source"), then we will stand in the clearing of existing literatures."Paying attention to income source"means we must stress the importance of the distribution of production factors and the opportunity of all people to use them. Our paradigm to the question is: (1) labor productivity (economic growth) has effect on (at least sub-regional) income per capita; (2) road infrastructure affects the change of labor productivity; (3) so through deduction, we know that road infrastructure may cause the change of labor productivity. Foremore, road infrastructure as an intervention tool perfectly fulfills the requirements. The reason is that the government can intervent the economy through road-building (by fiscal policies), and that road-building has little distortion on the whole economy. During the analytical process, the author concretely expresses the mechanisms of the three variables why they have relationships with each other.The author uses econometric methods about panel data to test these ideas, and the procedure is: He'nan Province's panel data are used to test the first two principles; then China's panel data are used to test the last one. The logic of this procedure is: (1) if the first two principles exist in Henan province, then the last must also exist in Henan province. But we have not tested the last one using Henan province's data. (2) according to the similarity between Henan province and China, we deduct that the last pricnple may exist in China, too. And then the author uses China's data to test the last principle.The positive results tell us that empirical data is consistent with the logical statements, so the hypothesis we presented is reliable. Fisrt, different methods are used to measure the variables we used; then many specifications and estimation methods are used to get the estimates; last the sensitivity and robustness of the estimates is tested. During the process, several important phenomina are revealed. For example, the role of road infrastructure is not as influential as we expected. And the role of road infrastructure is very different in East China, Central China and West China; this means the heterogeneity of road infrastructure is existed, as other researchers'refered to. At the same time, China's economic growth heavily depends on traditional production factors such as capital. So management, technology, and the change of institutions may play more important roles than before.The main differences or innovations against other literatures in this dissertation are: (1) a different idea about income distribution problem-solving was presented, and the fundamental thoughts were to solve the problem through economic growth. During the process we concretely demonstrated the mechanism of income per capita, labor productivity, and road infrastructure among these three variables. The main contents of this paradigm is presented following: road infrastructure may affect the quantity of civil cars and firms'inventories, then cause labor productivity to change; and labor productivity may cause income per capita to change mainly through the change of technological choices, and government's welfare expenditure may also has effect on the mechanism. (2) rigorously empirical analyses were revealed to test the mechanisms. The results tell us that road infrastructure may first affect the quantity of civil cars (not firm's inventories), then cause labor productivity to change; and that labor productivity cause income per capita to change mainly through the change of technological choices, and government's welfare expenditure has little effect on the mechanism. Furthermore, the role of road infrastructure is a little limited, and China's growth heavily depends on traditional production factors. So policy-maker should focus on management, technology, and the change of institutions. In short, the author found new knowledge among road, labor productivity and income per capita through scientific qualitative and quantitative analyses. This knowledge may become the stepping stone to slove the problem related to income distribution.
Keywords/Search Tags:road, infrastructure, labor productivity, economic growth, income per capita, income distribution
PDF Full Text Request
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