Foreign Direct Investment and Regional Growth in China

Abstract

China has experienced rapid economic growth and the recent Global Economic Projections 2004 by the World Bank suggest that there is a continuation of Chinese growth of at lest 7 to 8 percent (World Bank, 2003). Nevertheless, on the background of rapid growth came increasing regional disparities. This paper uses the augmented Solow-Swan model of Mankiw, Romer and Weil (1992) to analyze data on provinces of China over the reform period 1978-2003. Our main finding is that FDI has a positive and statistically significant impact on economic growth as theory predicts and the augmented Solow-Swan model provides an excellent fit of the data. The other determinants are significant at one percent level and have the expected sign. However, the human capital is insignificant or the coefficient is negative. --economic growth,conditional convergence,regional disparities