China’s Economic Growth: 1952–2010

This article attempts to account for China's economic growth in terms of labor, capital, and total factor productivity by estimating a Cobb-Douglas production function using official Chinese data. It is an extension of Gregory C. Chow's earlier work in 1993 and has two purposes: to find out whether the parameters of the production function have changed and to use the production function to forecast GDP growth up to 2010.¹ Official data on labor force and national output are readily available, although there was a change in the national income accounting system in 1994 from using an old and narrower definition of national income to using a measure of GDP that conforms to the standard definition of national income accounting. The estimation of a capital stock series is discussed in Section II. Section III provides estimates of the parameters of a Cobb-Douglas production function. Section IV presents the decomposition of growth of aggregate output into its three components and provides projections of GDP up to 2010. Section V contains some concluding remarks.