摘要
经济增长目标管理是一个全球性现象,现有文献忽略这个现象。本文从理论和实证两个方面考察经济增长目标管理对经济增长的影响。在理论上,本文证明了在一定条件下经济增长目标可倒逼资源配置,从而影响经济增长;但这并非最优的政策选择。在实证上,本文采用手工收集的除非洲和南美洲以外的全球各个经济体的经济增长目标数据,回归分析发现,在经济增长目标管理期间,增长目标变动一个百分点,实际经济增长速度也将变动一个百分点;经济增长目标对资本积累有显著影响,对技术进步有微弱影响,对就业和人力资本没有显著影响。这些发现是稳健的,进一步控制了可能存在的数据测量误差、地理、文化、制度、基因以及市场进入程序、成本和时间等变量后,依然成立,验证模型的部分结论。
Setting an economic growth target is a worldwide phenomenon ignored by current studies. Since the end of World War If, the phenomenon has appeared in at least 49 developed or developing economies and presents 3 typical facts. First, an economic growth target is followed by a specific allocation of resources. Second, an economic growth target announcement is positively related to the subsequent economic growth rate. Third, some economies have implemented economic growth target management, while others have stopped. A natural question arises： does an economic growth target matter for real economic growth？ To answer this question, we introduce the central government and ministry into a standard Schumpeterian growth model. The ministry is appointed by the central government and aims to maximize the growth rate, setting an economic growth target by which to measure the minister＇s success. The minister is responsible for approving investment in intermediate products and seeking approval rent. To encourage the minister to facilitate the approval of investment, the central government selects the growth target as the key performance indicator for the ministry. To meet the target and hold the position, the minister examines and approves more investment to achieve economic growth targets. We prove that there is an endogenous economic growth target in the economy that dominates the real economic growth of the economy. We also show that the balanced growth path driven by the growth target is lower than that of the economy without the investment approval. Thus, our model provides a coherent explanation for the aforementioned three facts. We collect data on growth rate targets by visiting the websites of each country in the world, excluding those of Africa and South America, and find more than 49 countries or regions had publically announced or have been announcing short-or long-term economic growth targets since 1950. Based on the 49 samples whose other economic variables come from the PWT90, we regress the real growth rate on the growth target. Consistent with the prediction of our model, the estimated elasticity of the growth target on economic growth is about one unit. This means that, all things being equal, a 1% change in the growth target is followed by a 1% change in the real growth rate during the target period. After controlling for possible measurement errors, geographical, cultural, institutional, and genetic factors and the series of indexes on regulation of entry, the estimated elasticity of the growth target remains unchanged. Finally, we exclude the other possible explanations. A major competing explanation is that the growth target is just a forecast indicator of economic growth. When this is the case, the growth target should be correlated with all kinds of production factors. However, our model predicts that the growth target drives the real economic growth through the reallocation of specific resources. As such, we regress the growth target on the several kinds of growth rates of production factors, and find that the growth target is significantly correlated with capital accumulation but not with labor and human capital, which coincides with our model＇s prediction. Our paper belongs within the literature of political economy of growth and development. North （ 1994 ） argued that the inconsistency of internal goals of the government could lead to the rise and fall of a nation. Though it is not easy to restructure the government to root out this inconsistency, it is not hard to set the inclusive target to eliminate it. As such, setting a growth target is only the second-best solution to breaking down the barrier to economic growth and driving resource reallocation. Our paper also complements the literature on inflation targeting, which was pioneered in New Zealand in 1990. Since then, 27 countries have adopted inflation targets, and a huge volume of literature has followed. Growth targets and inflation targets are both found in the four goals of macroeconomic management. At least 49 countries have been implementing economic growth target management, making growth targets an exciting area for future research.
作者
徐现祥
刘毓芸
XU Xianxiang LIU Yuyun(Sun Yat-sen Universit)
出处
《经济研究》
CSSCI
北大核心
2017年第7期18-33,共16页
Economic Research Journal
基金
国家自然科学基金项目(71673310
71373290)的资助
