R&D inputs and productivity growth in China

The relationship between investment in R&D and productivity growth have been well documented in the literature. So far little research has been done on this topic for China, in part due to data limitations. Using the perpetual inventory method (PIM), this paper first estimates the R&D stock in China between 1978 and 2002. If R&D stock is measured, we can then estimate the elasticity of output with respect to R&D, thus estimate the contribution of R&D investment to output in China. The paper finds China’s economic growth mainly depends on capital input and that the impact of R&D capital on China’s growth is insignificant between 1978 and 2002. Then the essay examines the impact of R&D input on Total Factor Productivity (TFP), and finds that R&D input explains 30% of TFP change in China between 1980 and 2000 and that one percent increase in R&D input leads to 0.27 percent increase in TFP in China. The essay also finds that TFP in China has experienced an unusual fall since 1995.Growth; R&D; Total Factor Productivity

Primordial Non-Gaussianity from LAMOST Surveys

The primordial non-Gaussianity (PNG) in matter density perturbation is a very powerful probe of the physics of the very early Universe. The local PNG can induce a distinct scale-dependent bias on the large scale structure distribution of galaxies and quasars, which could be used for constraining it. We study the detection limits on PNG from the surveys of the LAMOST telescope. The cases of the main galaxy survey, the luminous red galaxy (LRG) survey, and the quasar survey of different magnitude limits are considered. We find that the MAIN1 sample (i.e. the main galaxy survey with one magnitude deeper than the SDSS main galaxy survey, or r<18.8) could only provide very weak constraint on PNG. For the MAIN2 sample (r<19.8) and the LRG survey, the 2\sigma (95.5%) limit on the PNG parameter f_{NL} are |f_{NL}|<145 and |f_{NL}|<114 respectively, comparable to the current limit from cosmic microwave background (CMB) data. The quasar survey could provide much more stringent constraint, and we find that the 2\sigma limit for |f_{NL}| is between 50 and 103, depending on the magnitude limit of the survey. With Planck-like priors on cosmological parameters, the quasar survey with g<21.65 would improve the constraints to |f_{NL}|<43 (2\sigma). We also discuss the possibility of further tightening the constraint by using the relative bias method proposed by Seljak(2008).Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, RAA accepte