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.