Sources Of Economic Growth In China: 1952-2007

China has been making a miracle in the growth history of the world economy. The current focus is whether the growth miracle will persist. The common technique to answer this question is employing the methods of growth accounting. The literature at present is rich in this trend, whereas two puzzles remain not well solved yet. The first is lack of consideration between the stage of the economic development and the choice of growth theory. The second is how to compromise the results from different modeling. This inquiry seeks to contribute in the literature from an integrative perspective. We introduce the labor augmented neoclassical growth model and new growth model with both physical and human capital to explore the sources of Chinese growth from 1952 to 2007, and more attention are paid to the growth dynamics of total factor productivity (TFP) , technical progress and technical efficiency in the post-reform era. The internal effects and external effects of human capital are also integrated into the course of investigation.The dissertation has seven chapters. The first chapter raises the research questions and the second reviews the literature and present the theoretical framework. Chapter three and four go into detail discussing how the non-human capital and human capital are measured, which serve as core basis for later investigation. Chapter five employs parametric methods and present one whole-period estimation for the production function and one joint estimation for segmented production function. Chapter six focuses on the dynamics of TFP change, technical change and technical efficiency change in the post-reform era using the Malmquist productivity index. Chapter 7 presents the conclusive remarks and discussions.After constructing a complete and integrated database, we demonstrate that the joint production function is consistent with the China's growth facts, which leads to some distinctive findings from some important literatures in the field. Firstly, we find that labor augmented neoclassical growth model fits the whole-period analysis well whereas the Lucas model incorporating human capital preferably captures the growth feature of the post-reform era and human capital scales up the output elasticity of physical capital. Secondly, physical capital is major contributor of economic growth from 1952 to 2007 in china, while human capital act as an important complementary factor for physical capital and raise up the TFP level in the post-1978 era. Thirdly, TFP only prospects in the post-1978 era as an import but limited contribution to growth. For the post-1978 era, technical efficiency growth drives TFP going up from 1978 to 1991, technical progress takes the stage for 1992-2007. However, TFP growth rate stagnates since 1997 due to the lack of technical efficiency improvement. Finally, technical progress in the eastern China dominates the pattern of TFP growth for mainland China while technical efficiency improvement contributes relatively more to the growth of middle and western China.There are two types of technical progress: embodied and disembodied. The productivity change merely measures the disembodied one and factor accumulation embraces the embodied one. On the one hand, we find that the productivity stagnates concurrently. On the other hand, we substantiate that physical capital is the major contributor to growth. Since we have revealed that technical progress does not regress and is on the upgrade, the essential thing should be making progress in technical efficiency so as to push the actual output approaching the potential production frontier. Thus, we cannot simply claim that the Chinese economy is unsustainable merely through the observation of recent stagnancy of productivity growth.