| Summary: | This dissertation investigates the determinants of China's exports and regional economic growth,
the direction of causality between foreign direct investment (FDI) and exports; and convergence
analysis among Chinese provinces.
The study firstly discusses the evolutional process of China's foreign trade regime through
comparing the strategies and policies before 1978 with those after 1978. It is emphasised that the
export-promotion development policies result in the recent basic export patterns and
characteristics. Furthermore, the study reviews the existing literature on exports, FDI, and
convergence/growth determinants in the case of China.
The empirical work comprises three parts. Firstly, fixed-effects ordinary least squares (OLS) and
random-effects generalised least squares (GLS) panel data estimators are applied to test the
determinants of provincial exports from 1994 to 2003. It is found that FDI, geographical location,
investment in manufacturing innovation, and human capital have significant influences on
regional export performance. Secondly, the augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) tests are carried out
to test stationarity and the Granger causality tests are conducted to test the causal direction
between FDI and exports, based on monthly national data from January, 2002 to June, 2006. The
empirical results indicate that there is a one-way complementary causal link from FDI inflows to
China's export flows. Thirdly, three methods, beta convergence, sigma convergence, and Markov
Chain analysis, are used to do convergence debate among China's regions and the standard OLS
cross-section and random-effects GLS panel data are applied to test the conditional convergence.
The results suggest that the convergence hypothesis does not hold in China between 1994 and
2003 and there is a sign of conditional convergence, conditioning the explanatory variables such
as exports, human capital, and population growth. === Thesis (Ph.D. (Economics))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.
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