سرمایه انسانی، پیشرفت تکنولوژیکی و تجارت:رشد بلندمدت هند را چگونه می توان توضیح داد؟

Using data for the period 1950–2010, this paper seeks to explain the importance of human capital, technological progress, and trade in determining India's long run growth. This paper uses an improved growth accounting framework and ARDL-based co-integration techniques to identify the factors that drive long run productivity growth. The results suggest that both domestic technology capability building and foreign technology spillovers are important forces in determining India's long run growth. Human capital has turned out to be the most important factor. Trade plays a facilitating role by making available frontier technology in an embodied form from the rest-of-the-world. Although the analysis does not explicitly test any endogenous growth models, our findings are consistent with the recent endogenous growth literature.

India has been experiencing a rising GDP growth since the last quarter of the twentieth century and, according to some predictions,1 the prospect of the economy is optimistic, with growth expected at an average of 7% in the first quarter of this new century. This follows a quantum rise in India's GDP growth during the 1980s and its sustenance in the period thereafter.2 By the end of the twentieth century, India had emerged as one of the fastest growing economies globally, particularly after the 1990s (Ahmed & Varshney, 2012). While such improvements in growth performance are often explained in terms of wide-ranging reforms undertaken during this period, there are debates regarding the timing of the trend breaks in India's growth performance.

The present paper explores plausible factors underlying India's long run growth since 1950/51. Evidence points to a marked improvement in long-run GDP growth since the early 1980s. Macroeconomic performance had further consolidated through a step up in growth rate during early 1990s. Growth accounting results show that total factor productivity growth offers an improvement with significant contributions to growth in per capita income over the long run. The productivity estimates are consistent with Sivasubramonian (2004), Rodrik and Subramanian (2005), and Bosworth et al. (2007). The co-integration estimation results show that domestic capability in terms of human capital and domestic R&D, along with foreign technology absorption, largely determine TFP growth for the entire period of 1950–2010.