| China has been maintaining a high economic growth, and successfully crossed the poverty trap and achieved economic takeoff. However, there exists a GDP-oriented tendency behind the rapid growth, which emphasizes the "quantity" of economic growth but ignores its "quality" in varying degrees, leading to a series of uneven development issues. China has stepped into a "new normal" of economic development, and may face the risk of middle-income trap. Therefore, we must begin to pay attention to the quality of economic growth.This thesis focuses on three issues:what is the quality of economic growth, how to measure it and how to improve it."What is the quality of economic growth" is the foundation and prerequisite of the entire study. Referencing the definition of quality in Management, the quality of economic growth should be the level of which the inherent characteristics of economic growth meet the need of development. Referencing the definition of quantitative and qualitative change in Philosophy, quality of economic growth should be the development qualitative change inherent in the process of economic growth. No matter which definition referenced, its essential requirement is to study the quality of economic growth from the perspective of development. However, in the current studies on the quality of economic growth, the qualities of economic growth both narrowly defined and broadly defined mostly continued to discuss the characteristics of economic growth from the perspective of quantitative change. And meanwhile, since the quality of economic growth was not defined in advance from the essential meaning of quality, three pairs of perspectives were confused:"growth" and "development", "means" and "target", and "stock" and "increment". Thus there appear a series of problems in the subsequent studies on measurement and factors analysis of economic growth quality. Therefore, it is necessary to redefine the quality of economic growth from the perspective of development, which is also the most important innovation of the thesis. The quality of economic growth in this thesis is defined as the improvement of capability brought about by economic growth during the growing process. It attempts to solve the confusion of the three pairs of perspectives existing in current researches.The next step is how to measure the quality of economic growth. Due to the quality of economic growth is the improvement of capability brought about by economic growth, measuring economic growth quality is bound to be carried out on the basis of clarifying the relationship between economic growth and capability. According to Sen's theory, the range of capability depends on the resources possessed by the individual and impacts of personal characteristics, social conditions and environmental factors. Economic growth affects individual's capability by providing a variety of resources available to the microscopic individuals, such as the improvement of people's income, the provision of infrastructure and public services. Nonetheless, the size of the effect depends on the structure of economic growth, such as investment and consumption structure, industrial structure, the initial distribution of income structure, regional spatial structure, and so on, because these structures determine the allocation of resources created by economic growth among different groups and different sectors. On the one hand, the capability of the entire society, consists of microscopic individual's capability and on the other hand, the key points will differ when the relationship between economic growth and capability is examined separately form the micro and macro perspectives. Therefore, this thesis proposes two analytical frameworks of economic growth quality, separately from the micro and macro perspectives, then measures the quality of economic growth, and decompose its factors. Meanwhile, the two parts also provide a theoretical basis to the following discussion about how to improve the quality of economic growth.Since capability is an abstract concept which can not only be directly measured accurately and effectively, but has multi-level complex relationships with economic variables, we adopt structural equation model to take latent variables which can't be measured directly into analysis. Since structural equation model integrates the advantages of confirmatory factor analysis and path analysis, we can use it to reveal the complex relationships between various economic variables and capability, and recognize development qualitative change---improvement of capability--- inherent in the process of economic growth and this is the economic growth quality. The model is estimated by using AMOS software, with maximum likelihood estimation (ML). Taking into account the non-normality of samples, we modify the goodness of fit parameters, such as the value of chi-square, by using Bollen-Stine bootstrap, and estimate the standard errors and confidence intervals by using the bootstrap method.Finally, this thesis proposes a simplified method to measure economic growth quality, which can be better applied in practice. We take the difference of capability between two years as an estimate of economic growth quality. Then we measure the quality of economic growth in 31 provinces in China during 2000-2012, and make a comparative analysis, spatially and temporally, and further validate the factors of economic growth quality.Key findings are as follows:Firstly, education is of great significance to improve the individual's capability and development. At the micro level, the individual's education period has the most contribution to improve the capability in the model; at the macro level, the education level of the people around shows strong positive externalities for the individual development of the region.Secondly, the income distribution affects individual development, and the large income gap is harmful to the capability. The higher GDP per capita, the larger the negative effect of worsening income distribution on development.Thirdly, the GDP per capita is still an important factor in promoting capability, but there exists an inverted U-shaped relationship between them, which indicates that economic growth does not always produce positive development effects, and pursuing GDP excessively will make us deviate from the fundamental purpose of development and cannot improve capability and life quality.Fourthly, capital formation rate has an optimal value. Once the economy is in over-reliance on investment and exceeds this critical value, it will be detrimental to the quality of economic growth. At present, China's capital formation rate has far exceeded this critical value; as a result, we cannot continue to simply rely on investment to stimulate economic growth.Fifthly, as to industrial structure, the more reasonable the industrial structure is, the more conducive to improve the local income distribution and extend capability; the more advanced the industrial structure is, the more beneficial to improve capability.Sixthly, there exists an inverted U-shaped relationship between the proportion of labor remuneration and capability. Since China is still on the way of industrialization, the relationship between the proportion of labor remuneration and capability is negative in most time. However, when the GDP per capita is higher and the process of industrialization is almost completed, increasing the proportion of labor remuneration is conducive to extend capability, that is to say, the more equitable the distribution of income is, the more beneficial to capability.Seventhly, the economic growth quality index in east China is the highest and the lowest in west China. The contribution of per capita GDP to the quality of economic growth declined significantly after the 2008 financial crisis, while the negative effects of capital formation rate on the economic growth quality has increased dramatically. It indicates that the original pattern of economic development cannot be sustained especially after the 2008 financial crisis. If attention is paid only on GDP, it will ultimately undermine the quality of economic growth.Eighthly,31 provinces are divided into four groups according to the annual average economic growth rate and the annual average quality of economic growth. It rarely happened that a province jumped from a low quality group to a high quality group during 2000-2012. Instead, most of the provinces abandoned the quality of economic growth in order to obtain a high rate of economic growth, especially for those provinces with lower level of development in the central and western areas. It implies that provinces with lower level of economic development are prone to rushing, just paying attention to the speed instead of the quality.Ninthly, the quality of economic growth is incremental and it has no relation to the stage of economic development. Therefore, the economy at the lower stage of economic development is also possible to obtain a higher quality of economic growth, while the economy at the higher stage of economic development may also receive a lower quality of economic growth.Finally, the quality of economic growth is affected by the improvement of economic growth and economic structure, that is to say the more improvement of economic growth and economic structure, the more helpful to increase the quality of economic growth. Specifically, the increase of urbanization rate, the upgrade of industrial structure, the improvement of degree of coupling between industrial structure and local resource endowments structure, are all helpful to improve the quality of economic growth. Excessive reliance on investment will undermine the quality of economic growth. Since the positive effect of the increase of labor remuneration proportion on economic growth quality enhances as the GDP per capita increases, more attention should be paid to the fairness of initial distribution when the GDP per capita reaches a higher level. |
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