زمینه های رشد اقتصادی تایوان: مطالعه بهره وری 1978-1999

The objective of this paper is to measure the growth of TFP in 36 sectors and the whole of the economy of Taiwan during 1978–1999 by using detailed sectoral data that are adjusted in order to account for input–output tables and the capital utilization rate. The major findings are as follows. First, for the Taiwan economy as a whole, the TFP growth rate is estimated to be 3.01% per annum during the whole of the 1978–1999 observation period, while it is estimated to be 2.95% after adjusting for the capital utilization rate. Second, the relative contribution of TFP adjusted during 1978–1999 for the capital utilization rate to output growth is found to be as high as 41.0%, which is close to the relative contribution of the capital input (46.2%) and much higher than the relative contribution of the labor input (12.8%). Consequently, the Krugman–Kim–Lau–Young hypothesis, i.e. the ‘input-driven growth’ hypothesis is found not to apply to Taiwan during 1978–1999. This finding reinforces the conclusions of Liang (1995) and Liang (2002).

Since the 1950s, Taiwan's economic performance has attracted worldwide attention and has been a major source of pride at home. Over the past five decades, the average annual economic growth rate has been as high as 8.4%. More specifically, it has averaged 8.0% during the 1950s, 9.6% during the 1960s, 9.7% during the 1970s, 7.9% during the 1980s and 6.5% during the 1990s. Though the growth of the economy has been slowing down since the 1980s, this is actually not a major concern since an economy's growth level generally depends on the stage of its development. Nonetheless, Taiwan has certainly been undergoing dramatic structural changes. Alongside the phenomenal economic growth, the production costs have, on the one hand, been mounting at an even more rapid pace, which has resulted in the re-location of the so-called ‘traditional industries’ to the Southeast Asian countries and to mainland China since the mid 1980s. However, the advent of information technology has brought about the rapid growth of ‘high-tech’ companies in Taiwan. With such enormous changes, it is important to understand how Taiwan's different industries, both the survivors and the newcomers, have been affected, and to take the industrial changes into account when measuring productivity for the economy as a whole.

The objective of this paper is to measure the growth of TFP in 36 sectors and the whole of the Taiwan economy during 1978–1999 by using detailed sectoral data adjusted for the input–output tables and the capital utilization rate. A comparison with other similar studies is also conducted for validating the results and reevaluating the argument of the Krugman–Kim–Lau–Young hypothesis. For this comparison, we employ the growth accounting approach and disaggregate the input data by means of translog indexation.