000K  utf8
1100  2021$c2021-01
1500  eng
2050  urn:nbn:de:hbz:464-20210222-122852-8
2051  10.17185/duepublico/74073
3000  Heinrich, Torsten
3010  Dai, Shuanping
3010  Yang, Jangho
4000  Growth, Development, and Structural Change at the Firm Level$dThe Example of the PR China  [Heinrich, Torsten]
4209  Understanding the microeconomic details of technological catch-up processes offers great potential for informing both innovation economics and development policy. We study the economic transition of the PR China from an agrarian country to a high-tech economy as one example for such a case. It is clear from past literature that rapidly rising productivity levels played a crucial role. However, the distribution of labor productivity in Chinese firms has not been comprehensively investigated and it remains an open question if this can be used to guide economic development. We analyze labor productivity and the dynamic change of labor productivity in firm-level data for the years 1998–2013 from the Chinese Industrial Enterprise Database. We demonstrate that both variables are conveniently modeled as Lévy alpha-stable distributions, provide parameter estimates and analyze dynamic changes to this distribution. We find that the productivity gains were not due to super-star firms, but due to a systematic shift of the entire distribution with otherwise mostly unchanged characteristics. We also found an emerging right-skew in the distribution of labor productivity change. While there are significant differences between the 31 provinces and autonomous regions of the PR China, we also show that there are systematic relations between micro-level and province-level variables. We conclude with some implications of these findings for development policy.
4950  https://doi.org/10.17185/duepublico/74073$xR$3Volltext$534
4950  https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hbz:464-20210222-122852-8$xR$3Volltext$534
4961  https://duepublico2.uni-due.de/receive/duepublico_mods_00074073
5051  320