The Dynamics of Provincial Growth in China: A Nonparametric Approach

We use a recently developed non-parametric approach to analyze the variation in labor productivity growth across China's provinces. This approach imposes less structure on the data than the standard growth accounting framework and allows for a breakdown of labor productivity into capital deepening, efficiency gains, and technological progress. We find that capital deepening is the prime factor behind the change in the distributional dynamics of the labor productivity: on average capital deepening accounts for 75 percent of total labor productivity growth, while improvements in efficiency and technological progress account for 7 percent and 18 percent, respectively. We also find that while improvements in efficiency levels are higher in initially less productive provinces, relatively more productive provinces benefitted more from technological progress than less developed ones.