China's Pursuit of Environmentally Sustainable Development: Harnessing the New Engine of Technological Innovation
37 Pages Posted: 21 Mar 2016 Last revised: 22 Mar 2016
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China's Pursuit of Environmentally Sustainable Development: Harnessing the New Engine of Technological Innovation
China's Pursuit of Environmentally Sustainable Development: Harnessing the New Engine of Technological Innovation
Date Written: March 21, 2016
Abstract
Whether China continues its business-as-usual investment-driven, environment-polluting growth pattern or adopts an investment and innovation-driven, environmentally sustainable development holds important implications for both national and global environmental governance. Building on a Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans growth model that features endogenous technological change induced by R&D and knowledge stock accumulation, this paper presents an exposition, both analytically and numerically, of the mechanism underlining China’s economic transition from an investment-driven, pollution-intensive to an investment and innovation-driven, environmentally sustainable growth path. We show that if R&D technological innovation is incorporated into China’s growth mechanism, then at some tipping point in time when marginal welfare gain of R&D for knowledge accumulation becomes equalized with that of investment for physical asset deployment, China’s economy will launch capital investment and R&D simultaneously and make a transition to a sustainable growth path along which consumption, capital investment, and R&D have a balanced share of 5:4:1, consumption, capital stock, and knowledge stock all grow at a rate of 4.9%, and environmental quality improves at a rate of 2.5%. In contrast, if R&D technological innovation is not harnessed as a new growth engine, then China’s economy will follow its business-as-usual investment-driven growth path along which standalone accumulation of dirty physical capital stock will lead to an more than 200-fold increase in environmental pollution.
Keywords: Endogenous Technological Change, Sustainable Development, Economic Growth Model, China’s Economic Transition
JEL Classification: Q55, Q58, Q43, Q48, O13, O31, O33, O44, F18
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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