Analysis Of Macro-economic Growth And Regional Development Imbalances From The Perspective Of Social Capital

For the study of economic growth and regional differences, Lucas (1988) once said:"These issues included the human welfare consequences are alarming, once a person has to think about these issues, it is difficult to deal with other things." Attracted to the charm of the issues related to the economic growth, many researchers spent their whole life devoted to explore the mystery of economic growth. Different periods of the research result the so-called Theory of Economic Growth, which including classical economic growth theory, neo-classical growth theory, endogenous growth theory, etc. And in the process of economic growth researching, regional development imbalance has been confirmed as an objective fact in most area of the world. The long-term presence of this issue will reduce the economic efficiency and damage the efficiency of resource allocation. Therefore, this study has important theoretical and practical significance.After reform and opening up, although China’s GDP reached about9.8%annual average high-speed growth rate, there are still many problems exist in the process of economic growth, such as over-reliance on material investment, uneven regional development, etc. Faced with these difficulties and challenges, we urgently need to explore internal law and unknown influencing factors from the past experience of economic development, and ensure that the economy can maintain a stable development.Social capital is an important concepts and analytical tools of science in contemporary Western society, the concept of social capital and its research paradigm is an important breakthrough in today’s economics and sociological research content and methods. And the influencing factors, such as trust, social relations, networks, which theory emphasized are more suitable for Asian countries. Therefore, the emergence of social capital provides new perspectives and the reality of material for China’s economic researches. So we will start from the basic theory of economics, integrate social capital theory which has been researched, in order to analysis the status and causes of economic growth and regional economic differences in our country.There are three aspects in this study. The first is the study of existing literature on the basis of analysis of the impact of social capital on economic growth and regional development differences. And we explore the mechanism of the role of social capital in economic development through normative analysis. After this, we select the CD and CES production function under the framework of neoclassical growth theory, and compare the models which social capital is embedded in. After an empirical analysis of China’s macro-economic growth data, we judge and choose more suitable production function for the study of the condition of our country. At last, we analyze a decade of economic data on China’s provinces to verify the change and the role of the social capital in this process, and analysis whether social capital can better explain the phenomenon of China’s regional development differences.There are two innovations in this paper, One is based on the analytical framework of the neoclassical theory of economic growth, we systematic analysis the direct and indirect roles of social capital in the process of economic growth, and describe the impact of the various contributing factor of the social capital work on the regional development. The second is, after we respectively deduce the CD and CES production function which embedded in social capital, we apply them to the study of China’s economic growth and regional development differences. The result shows that CES production function has a better explanatory power.P. S:this study is sponsored by Macroeconomic Measure of Social Capital and Its Application, which is a national social science fund project.