Sources of economic growth in China from 2000–2013 and its further sustainable growth path: A three-hierarchy meta-frontier data envelopment analysis

This study, which considers both energy input and CO2 emissions, develops both theoretical and empirical models to account for the sources of China's economic growth from 2000–2013. The proposed models decompose China's economic growth into five components: the technological change effect, the industrial structure effect, the regional balance development effect, the management effect, and the production factors effect. The empirical results show that during the sample period, the production factors effect increased from approximately 70% in 2001 to nearly 99% in 2010, indicating that economic growth in Mainland China relied heavily on factor accumulation, which was not sustainable. Fortunately, this situation has gradually improved since 2011 because of technological progress and industrial structure optimization. However, the current total-factor productivity in Mainland China remains relatively low because of an inefficient industrial structure, regional balance development, and management inefficiency. In other words, there is a great deal of room for further industrial structural optimization, regional balance development, and management improvement to realize further sustainable economic growth. Because the causes of total-factor production inefficiency and the distribution of economic growth potential show a distinct spatial difference, the focuses for the Chinese provinces to achieve sustainable economic growth should be quite different in the future. Based on the results of this study, recommendations have been made for the Chinese provinces to realize further sustainable economic growth.