CHINA’S GROWTH STORY: THE ROLE OF PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE

The paper investigates the role of infrastructure in promoting economic growth in China using ARDL and GMM techniques for the period 1975 to 2007. In this context, an attempt is made to understand growth accounting equations to investigate the impact of infrastructure development on output. Overall, the results reveal that infrastructure stock, labour force, public and private investment play an important role in economic growth in China. More importantly, the study finds that Infrastructure development in China has significant positive contribution to growth than both private and public investment. Further, there is unidirectional causality from infrastructure development to output growth justifying Chinai¯s high spending on infrastructure development since the early nineties. The experience from China suggests that it is necessary to design an economic policy that improves the physical infrastructure as well as human capital formation for sustainable economic growth in developing countries.