منابع رشد بهره وری نیروی کار چینی : تجزیه و تحلیل تجزیه ساختاری، 1987-2005

We decompose labor productivity growth from 1987 to 2005 by examining six partial factors (both supply and demand): changes in value-added coefficients, labor inputs, shares of sectoral demands that are fulfilled domestically, input mix, and the intra-sectoral shares and intersectoral mix of final demand. Our analysis confirms that simply by virtue of its size and extremely low level of labor productivity, China's farm sector continues to weigh heavily in China's overall economic advances. Labor savings have levied the largest influence on the labor productivity on all sectors across all three study subperiods. We find that this transition is highly correlated with capital deepening that accompanies China's opening up process. Still, changes in the intra-sectoral shares and the intersectoral mix of China's final demand also have become quite strong, especially in recent periods. Due to ever-increasing competitive pressures as China continues to open, changes in industries value-added coefficients have tended to counteract some of the positive benefits of labor savings for most sectors. The effects on changes in labor productivity of technology change and changes in the use of imports have been comparatively negligible and any variation in their sectoral effects have been waning over time. JEL classification

For 2009, China's Government announced that its GDP growth was 8.7% (The Economic Times, 2010). In developed countries such growth would be a pipe dream. In a rapidly developing country like China, it is moderate growth and GDP growth on the order of 5.0% is a nightmare. In fact, since 1978 or so Beijing typically has viewed GDP growth of 8% as a minimum desired threshold. It has a real concern that, with low or no growth, rising unemployment could pose a threat to social stability and the legitimacy of government. With this in mind, it is clearly important, at least in the near term, for Chinese officials to get a better understanding of the factors that enable sustained GDP growth in China. Much of its leaders' concerns stems from China's relatively low-income per capita. In 2008 its GNI per capita in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP) was only 12.8% of that of the United States, 17.1% of Japan, 21.4% of Korea's, and 59.6% of Brazil's (World Bank, 2009). But Beijing's concerns are heavily mitigated when the purchasing power of most households edges upward at a sufficient pace, as it did even between 2007 and 2008 when it gained PPP by at least a percentage point against each of the above countries. Fortunately, countries at China's present distance from the technology frontier have the capacity for rapid growth if they can exploit and allocate available resources effectively. To do so, countries like China must adapt foreign technology efficiently and find a specialized niche in the world's market economy (Maddison, 2007). Researchers have in fact attributed China's economic success largely to the country's federal policies of pushing educational attainment, household savings, and the shipment of exports (Zheng, Bigsten, and Hu, 2008). At least through the early to mid 1990s, China's long-run economic growth was sustained by rising productivity across most, if not all, industries. This growth by industry was accompanied by a wholesale structural shift nationwide from low-productivity sectors toward those with higher productivity (Fan et al., 2003). Indeed, the shifts in employment and investments among industries in China lead to a distinctive regional development pattern, which yielded important policy implications regarding spatial disparities in economic growth and income (Yang & Lahr, 2008 and Liu et al., 1999). Wang and Szirmai (2008) found that the structural shift premium amounted to about a 20% of total growth from 1980 to 1990. Wu (2006) and others, however, have expressed some concern about recent evolutions in China economy into a pattern of so-called “extensive” growth, which is characterized by an expansion of imported inputs and less by domestic productivity growth. Zheng, Bigsten, and Hu (2008) attribute this extensive growth to China's various waves of reforms favoring short-run, capital-intensive growth. Lo (2007) suggests that in order for such capital deepening to be a viable economic trajectory in China, special care must be taken to assure that labor force growth does not outpace employment growth in the short to medium run. Zheng, Bigsten, and Hu (2008), therefore, advocate balancing short- and long-run total factor productivity (TFP) improvements and less strictly on capital deepening. Research focusing upon productivity and structural change in China is fairly thick. Still most of the focus on the national economy is at a very coarse level of industry definition. For example, most consider either manufacturing's share of the whole economy or a basic economic break out into just three sectors—primary, secondary, and tertiary industries. In fact the literature on structural change in China examines the country's labor shifts out of agriculture (Li and Haynes., 2008), which is dominated by small farms with constant returns to scale. In the main, the structural change literature ignores the interdependence of China's industries and regions. Because of a lack of literature on the effect of detail and industry interdependence on productivity changes in China, we opt to employ China's series of input–output tables to examine the country's economic change. Input–output tables often reflect the greatest industry detail possible for a country in order to capture the essence of industry interdependence. Employing input–output tables for structural decomposition analyses can reveal the fullest extent to which changes in industries' input requirements and final demand lead to changes in overall productivity growth. Such analyses follow the thought of Krüger, 2008 and Silva et al., 2008, who by using formal analysis emphasize that supply-side and demand-side factors closely interact to shape the process of structural change. Empirically, however, most contributions lean heavily on neoclassical growth theory, which puts great emphasis on technology-driven growth and lacks treatment of demand-based factors. By invoking both the demand- and supply-side perspectives simultaneously, our research is differentiated from prior analyses of productivity change in China. Hu and McAleer (2004) also apply an input–output framework to study China's structural change. They focus upon the nation's growth of gross output from 1992 to 1997, however. While somewhat connected, the focus of our research is productivity change, not change in gross value of shipments, which is akin to net business revenue. In the end, an input–output approach allows us to bring more information to bear upon the study of the sources of productivity change in China. At this point China has produced input–output tables from 1987 to 2005. Using concordant employment data for those years, we decompose the sources of changes in labor productivity growth into changes in value-added coefficients, labor inputs, domestic supplies, technology, intra-sectoral input shares, and interindustry mix. The paper is organized as follows: we begin with the description of the decomposition method applied in the paper. Next is the data introduction and treatment. We overview how productivity has changed in China and perform the decomposition analysis. The final section concludes the paper.

We are inquisitive about China's extraordinary economic growth. It appears that China's nationwide labor productivity growth has been more rapid than that for any of its major component industries. As Wang and Szirmai (2008) suggest, we find that wholesale macroeconomic shifts from low- to high-productivity industries are a major cause. We forward that structural decomposition analysis (SDA) using input–output (I–O) tables is suited to analyze detailed causes of such extraordinary economic change. In particular, I–O-based SDA provides the ability to analyze supply and demand factors simultaneously. This ability is unique among econometric approaches; we consequently insinuate that other approaches tend to be inadequate for any comprehensive study of structural change. Despite the fact that SDA enables us to control for demand factors, as well as supply factors generally examined, we confirm the well-known results that labor savings are a long-term, dominant cause of productivity growth: moreover, we confirm this for the case of China. The strength of this factor within each of the broad sectors examined has remained remarkably strong during the period of study 1987–2005, particularly compared to that for the economies of other countries that have been investigated using SDA. Our analysis confirms that China's outstanding pattern of growth does stem from its movement of workers out of agriculture and into more productive economic activities. We also confirm that labor productivity growth in China is fortified by labor savings across all sectors of the economy. Indeed, we show that labor savings continue to far outpace the effect of international competition, which places downward pressure on establishments' income-generating abilities. While technological change and the substitution of imports for domestically produced goods may be enabling labor savings, we demonstrate that their independent effects on labor productivity change tend to be comparatively negligible and that the magnitude of their effects varies modestly across sectors and time. The directions of these effects tend to vacillate as well during the study period. Meanwhile, we find that the pressure from structural transformations generated by changes in the intra-sectoral shares and the intersectoral mix of China's final demand were quite strong. Moreover, our analysis demonstrates that the influence of these components of final demand rose faster than did the nation's industries' labor-saving propensities from 1987 through 2005. In particular, we find that households are becoming an economic driver not through how much they are spending but rather what they are spending their hard-earned cash upon. Moreover, we note that this phenomenon likely was not possible prior to real estate and banking reforms. Thus, our findings support Maddison's (2007) discussion of not only how real income rises in China altered the basket of agricultural goods (more meat and fish) and the amount of manufactured goods consumed, but also how it transformed demand for higher-quality housing. We also found that low-technology sectors like Food; Textile; Sawmill and paper products were prime sources of growth through most of the 1990s. From 1997 to 2002, Sawmill and paper products continued to be a main source of productivity growth, but that sector was joined by the Primary metals, Machinery and transportation equipment, Electric and electronic products, and China's tertiary industries. In general, however, industry-level effects were less pronounced in this later period. Nonetheless, the agriculture sector's low level and growth in labor productivity continue to be a substantial drag on China's economy. It is vital that Beijing ameliorates this condition. Of course, the industry's tendency for a lack of economies of scale and physical limitations generated by both the typical small size of China's farms and the nation's topological geography pose ponderous hurdles. Thus, as Maddison (2007) suggests in the case of agriculture, it may be that increasing imports of farm goods, as opposed to Japan's model of high-cost self-sufficiency policies, could be a viable policy avenue for Beijing to pursue. Findings by Yang & Lahr, 2008, Aroca et al., 2008 and Hu & McAleer, 2004 suggest that China's continued development could be enhanced via improvements in the nation's freight transportation system. We were not able to track the transformation of the transportation service industries separately in our present analysis. Nonetheless, if effected, such enhancements undoubtedly would improve the apparent productivity of farm and manufacturing establishments located in China's interior by making them more cost competitive with those near the coast. We emphasize agrarian and transportation service reforms because the farm sector remains the 800-pound gorilla of the Chinese economy. Without productivity improvements in that sector, Beijing's goal of annual GDP growth of 8% or more will be difficult to sustain. In part, we suggest this because our results suggest that gains from further labor savings, outside of those from intersectoral shifts, appear to be waning and approaching levels observed in Japan and developed western nations. But we also suggest it because such reforms would improve the lot of the poorest and largely rural sectors of the economy. Enhanced income in rural economies would further boost the nation's consumption propensity, which, as we demonstrate, is fast becoming a major source of growth for China's economy. China's 11th five-year plan calls for its economy to depend on science and technology and the expansion of market-based institutions. Continuing to milk the cash cow is a logical course for a policy strategy. For, as Rodrik (2006) mentions, government policies can largely claim to be responsible for China's domestic capabilities in consumer electronics and other advanced areas during the late 1990s and early 2000s. But Schott, 2008 and Amiti & Freund, 2008 point out that the skill content of China's exports may not be all that sophisticated nor has it improved much despite the degree of export churning we have noted in the present analysis. Thus government nudges to engage its labor in higher value-adding production would only assure improvements that could take China into greater competition with high-profit, niche businesses (those with extensive rather than intensive margins) of developed world.