The Effects Of Import And Export Trade On China’s Economic Growth Efficiency With Resource And Environmental Constraints

Since economic reform from1978, China’s economic growth presents two features, namely pushed by production mode of "high input, high pollution and low efficiency" and pulled by demand structure of "high investment, high exports and low consumer". These two features are characterized by long-term development of China’s economy. Low cost labor and opening up policy result in export-oriented industry’s expansion, meanwhile, distorted prices of production elements and resource product cause excessive investment, and the excess capacity turns to international markets. In this process, the economic growth efficiency has been neglected. Therefore, taking resource and environmental constraints into consideration, this article will research the impacts of foreign trade on economic growth efficiency, and improve the selection of variables and estimation.This article includes five parts, introduction, literature reviews, and measurement of economic growth efficiency, analysis of foreign trade’s impacts on growth efficiency, conclusions and policy suggestions. The third and the forth parts are the main contents. Chapter1briefly presents this article’s background, significance, structural arrangements and the main innovations. Chapter2reviews and evaluates the existing theories and empirical literatures, which are the theoretical basis and methodology of this study. Based on China’s regional sectors’panel data from1992to2012, Chapter3re-measures China’s economic growth efficiency, and conduct convergence test on regional differences. According to the above conclusions, using panel analysis with fixed effect, this paper estimates the impact of import and export on economic growth efficiency, with human capital, FDI, industrial structure, ownership structure and institutional factor as control variables. Chapter5presents this study’s main conclusions and some policy suggestions.The main conclusions are as follows:taking resource and environmental constraints into account, the improvement of China’s economic growth efficiency benefits from technical efficiency, and the convergence trend shows in a stronger manner; export is only positive to resource and environmental related technical efficiency, the possible reason is export companies try their best to meet international environmental standards in order to compete in international markets; however, import is negative to technical efficiency, for irrational import product structure and import companies’limited ability to learn; human capital does good to technological progress; FDI’s effect on economic growth efficiency isn’t obvious, while the reasonable structure of property rights’effect is obviously positive; the high proportion of industry or excessive government intervention aren’t conductive to economic growth efficiency.