The Impact of Human Capital and Social Capital on Economic Growth in China
type: CreativeWork
description: In recent years the transformation of the economy of China, a country with almost twenty percent of the world’s population, has been the most important economic development of late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. The transformation of the Chinese economic system in the wake of Deng Xiaoping and China’s expansion into global markets for manufactured goods such as Asia, EU and USA have been the important preconditions for this growth. Within China, current studies show that some provinces with natural advantages such as better access to markets and better access to investment capital, and some provinces with human resources advantages such as a larger share of workers at the higher education level and higher level of social capital have outperformed provinces without those advantages in economic growth. This dissertation makes several contributions to the existing literatures. First, different from existing studies exploring the effect of the average level of human capital on economic growth, this dissertation examines the effect of the share of workers whose highest level reached is college, the share of workers whose highest level reached is lower than higher education and entrepreneurial human capital on GDP growth. Second, this dissertation initially uses the commercial group as a proxy for social capital. Focusing on the provinces of China, this dissertation uses a cross-sectional data set from 2005 to 2017 and finds that, the share of workers at the higher education level has a significantly positive effect on GDP growth in China; the share of workers whose highest level reached is lower than higher education has a lower effect on GDP growth in China than the share of workers whose highest level reached is higher education. We use the proportion of population who are the CEOs of private enterprises or self-employed individuals to proxy entrepreneurial human capital. The proportion of the population who are CEOs of private enterprises or self-employed…
abstract: In recent years the transformation of the economy of China, a country with almost twenty percent of the world’s population, has been the most important economic development of late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. The transformation of the Chinese economic system in the wake of Deng Xiaoping and China’s expansion into global markets for manufactured goods such as Asia, EU and USA have been the important preconditions for this growth. Within China, current studies show that some provinces with natural advantages such as better access to markets and better access to investment capital, and some provinces with human resources advantages such as a larger share of workers at the higher education level and higher level of social capital have outperformed provinces without those advantages in economic growth. This dissertation makes several contributions to the existing literatures. First, different from existing studies exploring the effect of the average level of human capital on economic growth, this dissertation examines the effect of the share of workers whose highest level reached is college, the share of workers whose highest level reached is lower than higher education and entrepreneurial human capital on GDP growth. Second, this dissertation initially uses the commercial group as a proxy for social capital. Focusing on the provinces of China, this dissertation uses a cross-sectional data set from 2005 to 2017 and finds that, the share of workers at the higher education level has a significantly positive effect on GDP growth in China; the share of workers whose highest level reached is lower than higher education has a lower effect on GDP growth in China than the share of workers whose highest level reached is higher education. We use the proportion of population who are the CEOs of private enterprises or self-employed individuals to proxy entrepreneurial human capital. The proportion of the population who are CEOs of private enterprises or self-employed…
author: Yu, Jie
keywords: Economics
date published: 2023-01-01T08:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:41:01Z
provider: Claremont Graduate University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Claremont Graduate University