Study Of The Contribution Of Land For Construction In Economic Growth

Land is a carrier for man's survival and social production. Also it is an indispensable physical basis of man's survival and development. Besides, it is a carrier and roomage for social economic activities. The relationship between land and economic growth has been informally discussed in the earliest classical economics. Land is deemed as one of the three major factors of supporting economic growth. In 1662, William Petty said that "Land is mother of wealth;labor is father of wealth and passive factor". David Ricardo pointed out that land was the key to value theory. Land utilization appears with the birth of human being and evolves with the social development and technological progress.Traditional main-stream economists think that the supply elasticity of land is zero. What they consider most are labor and capital when they are studying economic development. And a lot of researches have been focusing on these two factors, which are based on the assumption of David Ricardo in the 19th century. The research assumes that with the technology progress, improvement of transportation condition, and governmental adjustment of administrative planning, the supply elasticity of land will change. Founded upon Mankiw, Romer and Weil's (1990) neoclassical growth model of human resources, the paper tries to find that the supply elasticity of land is not zero, i,e, to studies the contribution of construction land to economic growth in the course of rapid industrialization and urbanization when the land supply is changing with the economic development.There're already a lot of scholars having done or doing researches on the relationship between land and economic growth. However, there are rare researches on the contribution ratio of construction land to the economic growth, especially when it comes to the prefecture-level cities in a certain province. This paper takes Zhejiang province, who keeps ahead in economic development, as the research object and analyzes the construction land utilization in its 11 prefecture-level cities. A theoretical model of economics is built to analyze the relationship between the construction land and economic growth and estimate the contribution ratio of construction land to economic growth in 11 cities with panel data. Based on the estimates, corresponding conclusions and policy implications will be put forward. The paper consists of the following sections:Section one constructs the theoretic foundation on the basis of review and evaluation of literature about economic growth and relationship between land and economic growth, which is a foundation for dynamic theoretical model building.Section two analyzes the status quo of economic development and land utility of the 11 prefecture-level cities in Zhejiang province, including their overall economic development level and advantages, utilization of construction land and existedproblems.Section three builds a theoretical model for the dynamic relationship between the economic growth and construction land demand. Based on the research of the second section, it builds a dynamic relationship model, then by mathematics deduce, we are to draw the conclusion that the relationship between economic growth and construction land demand has a character of conditionally convergent. The rapidly increasing demand of construction land won't necessarily result in higher economic growth rate, but it will lead to higher economic volume.With the method of econometrics, Section four tries to estimates the contribution ratio of construction land to the economic growth based on the dynamic model. Finally, we will checkout the outcome of the academic duduce on a demonstration view, and sum up some corresponding conclusions and policy implications.