Understanding Growth in China's Regional Economies

This paper applies growth equations to examine the impact of region-specific factors on China's growth in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, this study focuses on investigating the role of capital formation, initial conditions, labour productivity, human capital, openness, infrastructure, foreign capital and economic reform in China's regional growth. It is found that those variables account for 70–90% of China's growth in the past decades. The robustness of the findings in this study is tested by estimating alternative models.