An Empirical Study On The Effects Of Service Industry Structure On Service Growth In China

Since the reform and opening-up, China’s economy has maintained rapid growth for more than30years. Although China has made great achievements in GDP, the proportion of value added and employment of China’s service industry is significantly low. This problem is a key issue for scholars both at home and abroad. Structure bonus is considered to be a key factor of economic growth through resources reconfigured and industry structural change. Rationalization of industrial structure and optimization of industrial structure are two aspects of service industry structural change. Structure change affects the service industry growth through "structural bonus" and "leading industry-driven" mechanisms of action.This paper starts from the general trends and structural changes of China’s service industry, compares it to foreign countries to reveal China’s service industry development status. We develop a measurement of service industrial structure from the rationalization and optimization of industrial structure, and specify a model to explore the relationship between service industrial structure and growth. We find that there is no structure bonus in China’s service structural change; the rationalization and optimization of service structure both have a positive effect on service growth, they help speed up the growth of service industries and increase the proportion of value added and productivity. The contribution of the rationalization of service industrial structure to service growth is much greater than the optimization. The effect of optimization of service structure on the proportion of employment is not significant. In the policy making process, the government should give consideration to the rationalization of service industrial structure and to the optimization, should concern about the coupling quality of inputs and outputs structure.