"Resource Curse" Effect On Regional Economical Development In China

What role do natural resources play in economic growth which become increasingly important under the background that China's regional disparity becomes severe and the price of natural resources rises? At first glance, the rich natural resources in western region should bring an opportunity to economic development in western China so as to narrow the gap between regions. However, in home and abroad, rather cruel fact is that the growth rate of the economies rich in natural resource lagged far behind the countries which poor in natural resource, which have had been called "resource curse".This article is based on the theories of comparative advantage, "the trap of comparative advantage" and the associated competitive advantage, using the econometric analysis and comparative analysis to analyze the natural resources and economic growth of China's provincial-level units. First of all, this paper has established a model of natural resources and economic growth that according to the actual situation of the economic development in the eastern and western regions ,through the analysis to determine the existence of the "resource curse" as well as its transmission mechanism. We found that, there is "resource curse" effect on the basis of natural resources in the reserves level, and there is "resource curse" effect in industry level if considered in isolation, but after adding the controlled variables it had played a positive role in economic growth, and natural resources promote economic growth in the trade level, but it did not pass the significant level of testing. In the transmission mechanism, the natural resources have played a role in impeding the domestic investment and FDI, including the physical capital and technological innovation ;on the one hand, it promote the human capital and the development of opening to the outside world's to some extent. In addition, through empirical study of the controlling variables and economic growth we found that, FDI and domestic investment play an important role in China's economic growth. The opening to the outside world and the structure of ownership measured as non-metric indicators have played an important role in China's regional economic disparities, and the industrial structure, technological innovation and human capital have played not a significant role in China's economic growth, and environment have had a negative effects on economic growth which means that the economic growth at the expense of environment is no longer feasible. Finally, this paper gives the proposed countermeasures on the basis of the above analysis .