International Trade And Human Capital’s Impact On Technical Efficiency

As the driving force of economic growth, technological progress helps to improve total factor productivity, and enhance the sustainability of economic growth, achieving long-term stability of the national economic development. With the in-depth academic research, increasing productivity can be decomposed into two parts of the technological progress and technical efficiency change. Apart from relying on many factor inputs such as material capital, labor and human capital, output growth also depends on a country level of ascension in technical progress and technical efficiency.Based on the established level of the technology, the improvement of total factor productivity must rely on technical efficiency improvement, which draws wide attention of academic world, and makes a lot of research. In the late 1990’s,as globalization sweeps on, the 10 ASEAN countries and China, Japan and South Korea three countries formed "10+3" cooperation mechanism arising at the historic moment, and got rapid development, becoming main body of East Asian region and gaining remarkable achievements. Within ASEAN "10+3" cooperation mechanism, excluding Japan, other countries in the process of industrialization and modernization, still exist a huge gap with developed countries, which is a question we have to face. However, the research about technical efficiency in South-East Asian Nations "10+ 3" region is lack of enough attention of researchers, and related research is still very necessary.This paper has made an analysis on factors influencing technical efficiency in ASEAN "10+3 ".On the basis of practical analysis, the possible methods to improve technical efficiency are discussed in this paper. Due to capital and technology and other limitations, that through import and export trade about new technology and new materials, or by introducing foreign direct investment, including capital, technology and so on, is an effective way to shorten technology gap with the developed countries. What’s more, human capital is the main source of technical progress and technical efficiency change. Therefore, from the import trade, export trade, foreign direct investment, as well as the human capital four aspects, this article analyzes their impacts on technical efficiency change. Specifically, this article uses the 1993-2013 panel data of ASEAN "10+3" 13 countries, using stochastic frontier analysis (SFA),and empirically analyses the influence factors of technical efficiency change within the cooperation mechanism. In order to facilitate analysis, according to the national economic development level, this paper divides the ASEAN "10+3" region into high income regions, middle-income and low-income areas. Using Frontier 4.1 software, this article has set measurement model, concluding production function inputs output elasticity, technical efficiency change path analysis, and the analysis of the factors affecting technical efficiency. The study has found that there generally exists inefficiency phenomenon in ASEAN "10+3" region, and the gap between actual output and potential output mainly comes from the technical inefficiency. Technical efficiency level is affected by the global economic environment, taking on the trend of dropping first, then rising and dropping in recent years. Different levels of economic development in regions demonstrate different output elasticity of the production factors. Finally, discussing affecting factors on the technical efficiency, factors have some different among different areas, this paper provide some references about the policy options in ASEAN "10+3" region for our country.