The Analysis Of Total Factor Productivity’s Influencing Factors And Convergence:from Transnational Evidence

Generally speaking, economic growth can be accompanied with technical progress, and also, technical progress can accelerate economic growth, The interaction between them in return promotes their development. As an important component of total factor productivity, the function that technical progress contributes to economic growth has been subjected to intensive studies. Meanwhile, the study of total factor productivity has been on the mass excavation. In recent decades, the research of the gap between the developed countries and the developing countries has been an upsurge, and the gap of the economic growth is ascribed to the change of the whole productivity, therefore, the research on international total factor productivity will be priority.Based on the transnational panel data between 1992 and 2006, the total factor productivity is decomposed into technical efficiency and technical progress using DEA method, and the results show that total factor productivity level of the developed countries was below the developing countries. However, the total factor productivity improvement of the developed countries mainly comes from the technical progress, on the contrary, the total factor productivity growth of the developing countries mainly comes from the technical efficiency. Then, this paper analyzes the influencing factors of the total factor productivity and its components, computing results show that: either the human capital, R&D or the government expenditure and bank loan to the private sectors, every variable plays a positive role in promoting the growth of the total factor productivity. But in the analysis of the total factor productivity components which influencing factors take affect, the correlation coefficient between government expenditure and technology progress is negative, this also happens between the human capital and technical efficiency. These results don’t accord with the theoretical basis, because it’s not significant, so that both can be ignored and be regarded as no substantial relationship. Finally, this paper calculates the convergence of the total factor productivity between the developed countries and the developing countries in unit root test method. In the convergence test of developed countries and developing countries respectively, three tests reject the original hypothesis, therefore, these two economies converge respectively which may also say club convergence. But, when we combined the two samples and computed again, we found that the results don’t reject the null hypothesis, transnational data displays that total factor productivity is of divergence, there is no convergence. Likewise, overall data is divided into three time periods to recomputed in the unit root test method, other than 1997-2001 time period, two other time periods pass the tests. Even so, the total factor productivity between the developed countries and the developing countries doesn’t exist convergence. Conversely, the gap between the developed countries and the developing countries has the danger of expansion.