Three essays on China's productivity growth and technology development in international perspective.

摘要

In the following three dissertation chapters, I investigate China's productivity growth and technology development in international perspective, analyzing the impacts from foreign entry and competition, technology spillover and regional growth convergence, respectively.;In Chapter 1, "Foreign Entry, Competition and Heterogeneous Growth of Firms: Do We Observe 'Creative Destruction" in China?", we test the Schumpeterian idea of "creative destruction" using firm-level data from China's Large and Medium-Size Enterprise (LME) dataset. We find that in the face of foreign entry, domestic firms exhibit heterogeneous patterns of response depending on their technological distance from foreign firms. Domestic firms closer to the foreign technology frontier choose to compete, while firms that are further down on the technology ladder suffer a "discouragement effect" and lag further behind. We also show evidence that foreign-entry also induces a similar heterogeneous pattern in domestic firms' innovation-related activities.;In Chapter 2, "Research Clusters and Technology Diffusion: Does Distance Matter?", I investigate the scope of technology spillover in a developing country setting and focus on the role of major research clusters in promoting domestic technology diffusion. I identify four de facto research centers in China and investigate whether the effect of R&D spillovers from these research clusters is related to both geographic and technological distances. I find that firm-level productivity gains from R&D spillovers from the research cluster decline with (i) increasing physical distance away from the research cluster, and (ii) the technological gap between technology senders and recipients.;In Chapter 3, "Is Inequality Bad for China's Economic Growth?," I compare China's labor productivity growth across different regions and industries, and investigates how the initial productivity gaps with the international frontier affect their subsequent productivity growth. The research yields overwhelming empirical evidence that during the period of 1995-2004 China has experienced a rapid convergence in productivity growth across regions: the interior regions that are farther away from international frontier have grown much faster than the coastal region that is closer to the productivity frontier. Such growth patterns offer China a rare opportunity simultaneously to improve income inequality while maintaining a high overall growth rate.