Industrial Structure, Technical Efficiency And Environmental Constraints

In traditional economic theory, economic growth is mainly attributed to factor inputs and improvement of productivity. During the present period of expecting society's sustainable development and exploring to change the mode of economic growth, technical efficiency (TE) has become one of the important aspects of measuring economic growth. Moreover the industrial structure plays an important role in modern economic growth, and its adjustment has become an effective method to promote economic development. Therefore, to study the effects of industrial structure's differences and changes on technical efficiency is of great significance. In addition, the environmental pressure which is restrainted by industrial structure and affects economic growth at the same time, has become an urgent problem. Thus it's reasonable to incorporate the topic of environment into the framework of "Industrial Structure - Economic Growth" to study. During reviewing the relative theories and literatures the author was enlightened to use "DEA-Tobit" model to integrate industrial structure, environmental pollution and TE together, so that we can observe the industrial structure's effect on economic growth from a new viewpoint. Based on such idea, we took Zhejiang Province as an example when we carried out our study.After analyzing the conditions of economic growth, industrial structure and environment of Zhejiang Province and some of its areas, this paper firstly studies TE on the basis of 17 courties and cities' data between the year of 1997 and 2005. Although economic growth rate kept rising, according to the results of DEA, TE has shown a downward trend under the condition that factor inputs such as fixed assets investment and power have been increased significiently, the primary industry gradually declined and the teritary industry continuously expanded. Moreover the author discussed the effects caused by the external costs of environment and the pollution reduction costs. Besides, another important point is that environmental efficiency will promote the improvement of TE, which includes undesirable outputs.Subsequently, TOBIT model was applied to the regression analysis for industrial structure's effect on TE under the environmental restraint. The results are as follows. Firstly, the declining of the primary industry's ratio favors the rising of TE, the teritary industry's ratio dosen't promote the improvement of TE while both location quotients of these two industries have positive correlation with TE. Secondly, the secondary industry, whose ratio of most countries and cities are high, plays the most important roles in local area, though its location quotient has negative correlation with TE. Thirdly, too high degrees of industrial structure's change and similarity do harm to TE, however the economic scale has positive correlation with TE.At last this paper puts forward the proposals for promoting TE from the viewpoint of industrial structure.