Assessing the Role of Technology Adoption in China's Growth Performance

Nadja Wirz
Additional contact information
Nadja Wirz: University of St. Gallen, Switzerland

No 2008-06, EPRU Working Paper Series from Economic Policy Research Unit (EPRU), University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics

Abstract: China has experienced a period of tremendous economic growth in recent years. In an attempt to explain this development, several existing growth-accounting studies reveal that impressively high rates of productivity growth have been at the heart of China's performance. This study investigates to what extent these productivity increases can be explained by technology-adoption theory. In less developed countries, the key element behind technological progress is technology adoption, the process of copying technological knowledge invented throughout the world. To uncover a measure of China's technological advances, the paper constructs a hybrid of some prominent technology-adoption models and calibrates it to reasonable parameter values. The calibrated version of the model is then combined with Chinese economic data. For the period 1978-2005, the analysis finds that the Chinese performance can be explained to a surprisingly large extent by the suggested technology-adoption framework. It can account for roughly 80% of China's productivity gains.

Keywords: technological progress; technology adoption; TFP; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O11 O30 O40 O52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2008-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cna, nep-cse, nep-eff, nep-knm and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://web.econ.ku.dk/eprn_epru/Workings_Papers/wp-08-06.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://web.econ.ku.dk/eprn_epru/Workings_Papers/wp-08-06.pdf [301 Moved permanently]--> https://web.econ.ku.dk/eprn_epru/Workings_Papers/wp-08-06.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kud:epruwp:08-06

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EPRU Working Paper Series from Economic Policy Research Unit (EPRU), University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics �ster Farimagsgade 5, Building 26, DK-1353 Copenhagen K., Denmark. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thomas Hoffmann ().