A Study Of The Impact Of Culture Soft-input On Economic Growth

Classical economic theory emphasizes the land, labor, capital and other "hard-input" role in economic growth, since the new theory of economic growth, economists pay more attention to the important role of system, technology, knowledge and other "soft-input" on economic growth. Professor Li’s soft-input theory has made a reasonable explanation to China’s economic development. Based on the theory of soft-input, by reviewing the relevant literature, this paper put forward cultural soft-input and combining the reality of China’s regional economic growth, focusing on the direct contribution of cultural industry development to economic growth, the mechanism of the cultural soft-input effect on economic growth, and the influence of cultural soft-input on contribution rate of the soft-input. The main conclusions are as follows:First, as the production department of cultural soft-input, broad cultural industry play a strong direct role in driving economy foward. In the current phase, China’s cultural industry has strong backward linkages effect and the highest demand spread degree, even higher than the second industry; but the rate of intermediate demand and intermediate consumption is higher, the rate of value added and ultimate-use is low.Second, as the informal institution elements, cultural soft-input affect economic growth. The founding of New China, especially since the reform and opening up, the institutional changes including the culture informal institutional played an important role in economic growth. At this stage, China’s personal investment of culture has a positive impact on economic growth, government investment of culture doesn’t has a positive impact on economic growth.Third,cultural sof-input is an important factor of regional economic growth disparity. Studies have shown that regional economic disparity mainly showed the gap between China’s coastal and inland areas. This paper use the spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation as the substitution variables of cultural soft-input, found that:to some extent, the economic growth of coastal areas can be explained by the entrepreneurship, while entrepreneurship does not promote the economic growth of inland areas, and even may be a "burden"; at this stage, innovative spirit is not the main motivation of China’s economic growth.Fourth, at this stage, China’s cultural soft-input doesn’t have a positive effect on motivating workers’ enthusiasm. Workers’ enthusiasm is vector, the cultural motivation stimulation determines the direction of workers’ enthusiasm from the perspective of motivational pattern, and with the features of invariant or even increasing marginal utility. But the expenditure on culture of residents largely is "passive", and cultural consumption is still in the stage of basic survival and enjoyment, there is a certain substitutional relationship between cultural consumption and labor productivity, the level of developmental consumption is low.Fifth, cultural soft-input played a positive roles in the quality of China’s economic growth. At this stage.China’s government soft-input of culture, personal investment of culture and entrepreneurship have positive impac on the quality of China’s economic growth, but the display of this function influenced by the shock of government intervention, physical capital, opening degree and other factors.In conclusion, China’s broad cultural industry development directly stimulating economic growth, as its output, cultural soft-input contribution to economic growth indirectly by improving the quality of economic growth. Although this indirect contribution was not so prominent at this stage, from the point of view of regional economic growth experience and long-term economic growth, improving the levels of China’s cultural soft-input is of great significance.