تجزیه و تحلیل عوامل تعیین کننده سرمایه گذاری کل در دوره اصلاحات چین

Although investment has played an important role in China's phenomenal economic growth over the last two decades, there has been little research on investment determination at the macro level. This study sets out to explore and explain the factors that influence China's aggregate investment measured by the fixed capital formation during the reform period and to draw useful conclusions from analysing these determinants. The investigation is based on an assumption that aggregate investment in China is determined by both the cost of investment and the increasing aggregate demand created by the reforms. A dynamic investment function is developed to simultaneously capture the long-run and short-run properties of the investment behaviour. The empirical results based on a panel data set of 28 Chinese provinces and autonomous regions suggest that a homogenous equilibrium correction mechanism exists in China's aggregate investment process.

Aggregate investment measured by fixed capital formation in China has increased exponentially since the economic reform programme first started in 1978. Although there are disagreements about whether the aggregate investment is a driving force for China's recent economic growth, the importance of investment in the creation of aggregate demand and the improvement of economic infrastructures has been widely acknowledged Chow, 1993 and Sun, 1998. Since 30% of China's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) during the 1990s consisted of aggregate investment, its expansion provides an important source for growth in the aggregate demand for construction products, machinery, equipment, and other durable goods. This, in turn, leads to increases in the demand for consumer goods and services. Firms' investment behaviour and their investment funding allocations differ significantly between the pre- and postreform periods. According to Sun (1998), a system generated “investment hunger” existed before 1978 because firms' (especially the state-owned enterprises (SOEs)) investment decisions did not depend on profit maximisation or cost minimisation behaviour. Although it was desirable for SOEs to make profits once the new investment projects were completed, any losses were always borne by the central and local governments. This investment expansion drive, coupled with the soft-budget constraint, led to the inefficient allocation of scarce capital resources. The Chinese economy began its transition from a planned system to a market economy in 1978, and the shares of collective-owned enterprises (COEs), township and village enterprises (TVEs), and joint venture enterprises (JVEs) in terms of output and employment in the national economy have increased substantially. This, together with the introduction of various profit-incentive reform programmes, has changed firms' investment decision behaviour. Profitability and cost of investment have become the most important factors to be considered by firms in their short-run and long-run production plans. The key sources for investment in the prereform period were mainly from firms' internal funds and the central and local governments' budgetary funds. The process of firms' investment decision-making was, therefore, to compete for the acquisition and use of these funds. Since these investment funds were limited, the distribution of the funds to enterprises was unbalanced, only those enterprises (mostly SOEs) in the key industries, such as defence, public utility, and manufacturing industries, were able to share the limited financial resources. This situation has changed since 1978, and firms have gained more investment autonomy through the increased availability of both internal and external funds. The rise in internal funds was due to the adjustment of the depreciation rate from 3.6% before 1978 to 5.7% in the reform period. In addition, the amount of internal funds was also enlarged by the introduction of the profit-retention scheme and contract responsibility system (CRS). The increase in external funds was also made possible by a significant rise in rural and urban household savings during this period. The reforms in the banking system, such as decentralisation of credit control and the development of other financial institutions, have also helped to channel the financial resources towards a broad range of sectors in the economy. Although many researchers believed that aggregate investment has played an important role in China's phenomenal economic growth over the last two decades (see Chai, 1998, Chow, 1985, Chow, 1993, Liu et al., 1998 and Sun, 1998), there has been little research on investment determination at the macro level. This study sets out to explore and explain the factors that influence China's aggregate investment measured by the fixed capital formation during the reform period and to draw useful conclusions from analysing these determinants. This is particularly important on the eve of China's accession to the WTO, as an understanding of aggregate investment behaviour would help the government to formulate appropriate investment strategies in an environment where financial resources from abroad are widely available. The rest of this paper is organised as follows. Section 2 reviews the various aggregate investment models in the literature and discusses their relevance to the Chinese economy. Section 3 presents the methodology used in the study. Section 4 contains the empirical results and Section 5 concludes the paper.

The aggregate investment function with a homogenous error-correction process is estimated for each of the three broad regions in China. The model is specified based on the assumption that both the cost-constraint and demand-pull variables are important factors in the determination of investment behaviour. The investment cost variable is derived from the production function, which is then used to capture such influences as the opportunity cost of investment, depreciation of capital goods, changes in asset prices, taxation, and other costs incurred in the search for investment funds by the Chinese firms. The effect of demand on investment is modelled through the inclusion of expected output. Two types of error correction mechanisms are used to simulate firms' long-run investment decision behaviour. The estimation results of the investment model for all of the 28 provinces show that the short-run output and cost elasticities are 0.72 and −0.292, respectively, when both investment cost and output are included in the error correction process. The output and cost elasticities for the second error correction model that only contains the lagged ratio of investment to output are found to be 1.058 and −0.419, respectively. Both of these investment models are statistically significant with the desired properties. The empirical findings of this study imply that it is important to introduce favourable investment incentives in the central and west regions in order to create balanced economic growth. The homogenous equilibrium correction mechanism suggests that the demand for investment will change equiproportionately to the changes in investment costs and output. Since investment costs determine firms' investment decisions, a flexible, yet well-regulated financial system that gives firms easy access to various financial resources is considered to be crucial for the continuous investment expansion and economic growth in China, and China's WTO membership will prepare the economy for such a system.