Three essays in trade, productivity and growth of the East Asian economies (Singapore, Hong Kong, China)

The lack of good measure of productivity and a good framework in decomposing the different sources of economic growth contribute to puzzles regarding East Asian Miracles. Using Singapore and Hong Kong as case studies, this dissertation addresses both issues theoretically and empirically.; Focusing on improving the measurement of productivity growth, the first essay derives the dual equivalence of Hall's (1988) technique, and shows that both imperfect competition and decreasing returns to scale technology may result in a downward bias of primal and dual TFP growth rates. This paper establishes an empirical test that embraces both primal and dual approaches and shows that majority of the industries in Singapore's manufacturing sector violates either or both of the neoclassical assumptions. Once the two assumptions are relaxed, the estimated average annual growth rate of productivity of the sector nearly doubles the conventional measures.; Focusing on decomposing the growth of Singapore's manufacturing sector, the second essay sets up an empirical model to estimate the contributions of productivity and endowments in growth. The regression results show that both productivity and factor endowments are important in explaining Singapore's sectoral growth. The contributions of factor endowments are uniformly larger than that of productivity growth across all industries in Singapore's manufacturing sector, except for the electronics industry and the primary products industry. Productivity clearly dominates factor endowments as the most important source of growth in the electronics industry, while the two are equally important in the primary products industry.; The third essay tests the productivity versus endowment hypotheses using industry data of Hong Kong, from 1984 to 1997. The regression results show that only productivity matters for Hong Kong's manufacturing sector. On the other hand, productivity and capital endowments are both important for the service sector. Results of a weighted panel regression also show that when the average growth rate of factor prices is endogenized, it has a robust negative relationship with outsourcing of final goods. Outsourcing of final goods, via its dampening effects on factor prices, is the major reason behind the shrinking of the manufacturing sector. This is consistent with the Stolper-Samuelson effect of import competition.