中國 自動車產業의 生產性 硏究

Abstract

Abstract

Automobile industry in China has been developed dynamically since the Reform and Openness Policy. The amount of automobile production in China has recorded the first in the world and maintained this record. In 2015, China`s automobile industry has produced more than 24.5 million of vehicles, which is larger than the sum of productions by the second and third country.

Chinese government policy has played a major role in developing the automobile industry so fast. Chinese government has designated the automobile industry as a key industry and supported considerably and sustainedly. Based on the change of government policy, the stage of the development in China’s automobile industry can be classified into 4 stages; the period of an aid-recipient country(1949-1960) --> the period of autarky(1961-1978)--> the period of joint investment(1979-2000) --> the period of market competition. The Reform and Opennes Policy was the starting point which has transformed the planning economy into the market economy. Since that policy, the amount of automobile production has increased swiftly.

This paper focuses on the analysis on what roles the productivity played in increasing the amount of automobile production in China with the time series data 1992-2013. This study takes a theoretical approach by reviewing the existing academic literature in the measurement of productivity, which leads to usage of two factor-one output model, namely, capital and labor. Based on this model, two ways-indexical approach and functional approach-are used. The indexical approach is useful to measure the partial productivity of each factor, total factor productivity and factors contribution to production. The functional approach is benefcial to measure the partial elasticities of substitution, factor price elasticities of demand, returns to scale, technical progress and its bias by using cost function. And then two approaches are compared to review the relationships in terms of theoretical concepts and empirical results.

The findings of this empirical studies are as follows.

In comparison of two approaches, the results of indexical approach is similar to those of functional approach, though there may be some discrepancies, based on different assumptions.

First, the indexical approach indicates that capital productivity is larger than labor productivity. Due to lack of capital, capital-labor ratio is so low that capital productivity is high relative to abundant labor. The substitution of obsolete capital facilities helps increase its productivity.

Second, estimation results by two methods shows that there is no substantial productivity augmentation in China’s automobile industry during the above mentioned period. It means that the great part of increase of vehicles production has been made through the increase of production factor. This results reflect the fact that the simple combination of abundant labor in China with new capital facilities and techniques from multinational enterprises has contributed to the increase of vehicle production in China. The absorption of techniques from multinational enterprises is less successful that expected.

Third, diseconomy of scales has been working in the whole periods except several years. The inefficient usage of capital and labor decreased the productivity even though the investment to this industry has expanded the scale of production.

Fourth, the slight augmentation of productivity comes mainly from the technical progress. Even though the technical absorption from multinational enterprises and development of technology are less sufficient than expected, they are working on in the industry.

As a whole, based on the above mentioned empirical results, policy implications can be derived that input factor-centered production structure should be transferred to productivity-centered production structure.

However, it should be pointed out that this paper conducted an empirical analysis based on the limited model with only two factors(capital, labor) due to the imperfect data on the China’s automobile industry.