The Microfoundation Of Ecomomic Growth And Industry Development In The Perspective Of The Household Production Function

The division of microeconomics and macroeconomics has been questioned by many economists since the end of the1980s, among which what is widely criticized is the lacking of micro analysis to the macro phenomena. In the dissertation, the Household Production Function (HPF), which is offered by Gary S. Becker, the1992Nobel Prize winner in Economic Sciences, is taken as the theoretical basis of economic explaination and empirical test to the micro-foundation of economic growth and industy analysis.The current literatures lay emphasis of Gary S. Becker's academic achievements on having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior and interaction, including non-market behavior. But after a thorough review of the works of Becker's and his main cooperators' in the last half of century, it can be proven that most of Becker's academic achievements can be attributed to the application of the Household Production Function(HPF) which was put forward in his original paper Theory of the Allocation of Time in1965, with the fact that basic commodity and full income, the two key words that make the HPF different to the traditional theory of Consumers behaviors, can be found in most of their works. Stigler and Becker even claim that the great advantage of relying only on changes in the arguments entering household production functions is that all changes in behavior are explained by changes in prices and incomes, precisely the variables that organize and give power to economic ananlysis. Therefore, it is partial clearly only to emphesize Becker's contribution of expending the boundary of economic approach, but to ignore the application of HPF, the general theoretical basis of Becker's works, in the traditional field of economics,In order to explore the HPF into the economic growth study and industrial analysis, a unified two-dimensional coordinate system is built in the dissertation to show both the containment and the improvements of the HPF to the traditional theory of consumer behavior, and some theoretical discussion to the coordinate system reveals that the HPF can be applied to the industry analysis in the perspective of division of labour.At the time being, what impedes the furthermore empirical test to the economic implication of the HPF is that statistic data in time allocation is lack in nearly all the contries, apart from that Becker and his cooperators did not offered any specific classification of the basic commodity. Therefore, in the dissertation,(1) a basic idea of indirectly positive analysis of HPF is constructed which is built on the theoretical discussion in unified coordinate system;(2) according to the empirical tests both to the relationship between income and working time and to the relationship between income, marginal product of capital and saving rate, it is shown that HPF can offer a sound explanation the economic growth mode;(3) chain of coal-transportation-electric industry in china being taken as the case, the economic explination to the development of such industries is conducted with the help of a classification standard of the basic commodity, which is combined with the transfer of the Chinese development strategy in the last60years, and according to cost classification standard offered by HPF the difference of factor-outcome ratio between industries under the different condition of regulation is tested.