Modeling the temporal and spatial dynamics of Chinese economic growth during the recent reform period.

摘要

This dissertation examines the temporal and spatial dynamics of Chinese economic growth during the recent reform period. The focus is directed towards deriving empirical answers to controversial questions. I have reached conclusions at odds with "conventional wisdom." My growth-accounting analysis, based on a theoretical specification of multi-disequilibrium growth, diagnoses some fundamental problems in the system of the Chinese economy, which has led me to conclude that China's economic growth over the 1978-94 period is an example of a classical development process, that is, moving mobile resources from less productive to more productive sectors, particularly into the market-oriented, export-led manufacturing. My exploratory spatial data analysis provides new insights into the spatial dynamics of Chinese provincial output growth patterns, showing strong patterns of spatial concentration of high and low growth rates in all the study periods, even for 1953-1978 in which Mao's egalitarian regional policy dominated. A spatial spillover analysis using the local Moran statistic further detects a pattern of spread-backwash processes between the core and its periphery rim in the context of the Chinese spatial economy.;In explaining spatial and temporal divergence in economic performance, I conceptualize the spatial process of uneven regional development in China from a new institutional economic perspective. First, a spatial pattern with a capitalist Hong Kong at the core and mainland China at the periphery was created due to an institutional difference. Second, in a de-industrialization process, Hong Kong relocated its mass production activities to the Pearl River Delta because of spatial proximity and ethnic-kinship networks. Third, the introduction of foreign capital, technology, and know-how effectively induced growth in Guangdong, and this momentum of growth was further fueled by the ability of both domestic and foreign entrepreneurs to take advantage of agglomeration economies and the dynamic growth atmosphere developed there. Finally, once growth took a firm hold in Guangdong, it immediately set in motion forces that acted on the remaining parts of the country, resulting in a fundamental spatial restructuring in China's economic landscape. Implications of these findings are directed towards a reconceptualization of regional development theory.