Technological Backwardness Advantage And Economic Growth In China

Why does China's economy achieve rapid growth in past three decades? Incresment of fatores, technological progress and structural adjustment are sources of economic growth. Due to gradually improvement of structural adjustment and the law of diminishing marginal return of facoters, technological progress is the most important factor to achieve sustained economic growth. In the economic opening conditions, the use of the backwardness advantage of technology to achieve technological progress is an important way.Through anayzing the content, nature and the realizating channel of technological backwardness advantage, a basic conclusion can be made that the existence of the technology gap is the base of technological backwardness advantage. International trade (technology goods imports), foreign direct investment, technology purchase, as well as non-market approach are main channels to realize technological backwardness advantage. Based on the extended variety-expending endogenous growth models, we analyzed the technology progress with taking technological backwardness advantage and without it respectively, and then compare these two cases. It is conclude that allocating some R&D resources to use technological backwardness advantage is helpful to economic growth. Taking advantage of technological backwardness advantage can increase the rate of economic growth through stimulate technology progress. Empirical testing based on China-based time-series data (1978-2007) shows that technological backwardness advantage promotes China's economic growth remarkably. Taking advantage of technological backwardness advantage is a major cause of China's economic growth at this stage. The impact of self-innovation on economic growth is not significant.Through theoretical and empirical analysis,we can conclude that, since the reform and development, our country can take advantage of existing international technology by import, the import of high-tech products, which is an important Reasons of 30 years of sustained economic growth. However, during using of technological backwardness advantage, some problems occurs which limite using the tchnological backwardness advantage further. Therefore, some measures have to be taken to realize technological backwardness advantage further,such as strengthen technical capacity to absorb by R&D, as well as flexible and diverse channels to use technological backwardness advantage.