The Research On Threshold Effect Of Human Capital To Total Factor Productivity Growth Of Shanxi Province

The development of modern society increasingly depends on the innovation of knowledge and the progress of technology. As the carrier of knowledge absorption and technology research, human capital has undoubtedly become a key factor in promoting economic development and total factor productivity growth.Realistically, the labor resource of Shanxi Province is abundant relatively, the government and the community continue to expand investment to enhance the accumulation of human capital, but because Shanxi is now in a critical period of transformation development and lack of appropriate institutional mechanisms leading to the growth effect of human capital has not been realized fully. The human capital only meets certain conditions, then its utility can be played fully to promote total factor productivity growth. And these specific conditions constitute the threshold of the human capital to promote the growth of total factor productivity. After stepping over the "threshold", the impact of human capital on total factor productivity will be a qualitative change, and emerge a threshold effect. And specific threshold level often can be used as a measure of the current regional developments as well as the theoretical reference of relevant policies and measures for each cities. Therefore, researching impact of human capital on TFP and exploring the threshold level under certain conditions from the threshold angle have an important theoretical and practical significance to improve the human capital accumulation, accelerate the transformation of economic growth mode and achieve sustainable economic development for Shanxi Province.On the basis of domestic and foreign research, this paper took the human capital theory, TFP theory and threshold theory as the guidance and explored the mechanism of human capital on productivity growth, then analyzed the current situation of human capital and total factor productivity growth in Shanxi from a realistic point of view. Then selecting the panel data of Shanxi from2000to2011, this paper builded threshold model. Applying the related statistical software, it tested the threshold effect of human capital on TFP growth and did empirical analysis by taking the level of human capital, different levels of human capital and the economic environment variables as the threshold variables respectively.The study found:The human capital level significantly existed single threshold effect in the impact of human capital to TFP growth and the threshold value was9.225. And the effect of human capital growth increased gradually with the promotion of human capital level. Over the past decade, human capital level of each city in Shanxi Province upgraded gradually and the number of cities that stepped across the threshold also increased; It was not in the same degree of influence for different levels of human capital impact on the human capital growth effect in Shanxi Province; There was no threshold effect for secondary education human capital to human capital growth effect, while both basic education and tertiary education human capital emerged single threshold effect, and threshold values were10.124%and1.941%respectively. The basic education human capital of each city in Shanxi developed well, but the development of higher levels human capital was not ideal; There existed significant nonlinear characteristic for the impact of economic environment variables including financial development, infrastructure,trade openness to human capital growth effect, and it presented complex dual-threshold effect. At the same time, the impact of human capital on total factor productivity growth became remarkable gradually with each index crossing the corresponding thresholds. Finally, based on the results of qualitative and quantitative research, this paper put forward some suggestions to develop human capital and optimized human capital structure, and specific measures include:increasing investment in education, optimizing the education structure of regional human capital gradually, introducing the high-level human capital, strengthening the promotion role of other economic environment variables on human capital accumulation, and enhancing the growth capability of total factor productivity...