| Summary: | 碩士 === 中原大學 === 國際貿易研究所 === 94 === Taiwan belongs to the island type economies with dense population and few natural resources. The increases both in economic growth and the accumulated amount of foreign exchange reserves depended mainly on the expansion of international trade. Since 1950, the government has pursued economic development actively and the whole islanders work diligently under excellent education and industrial systems. All these efforts thus successfully created the well-known Taiwan economic miracles. Recently, economic system in Taiwan has gone through the industrial structural changes. For instance, it relied heavily on agriculture in early 1950s. However, it then converted to a more industrial economy which produced labor-intensive goods in middle 1970s. Now it enters the service-oriented economy stage, therefore, we need to develop many modern industrial technologies to catch up with other industrial economies.
The study included two major parts. The first part performs empirical analysis by using economic growth theory and structure equation modeling（SEM） to find out which factors affecting Taiwan’s economic growth between 1990 and 2005. The second part of this study applies the material flows theory noted by Wernick & Ausubel(1995) and World Resource Institute et al.(1997) which based on the assumption of material balance globally to the specific industrial sectors of interest. We collect import, export, production, inventory and waste generated to construct industries’ material flow data bank for the fabric, dyeing and garments during 1996 to 2004. All data of materials are measured by weight in this study. The purpose of this part is to observe the efficiency of the material usage and its environmental impact.
The empirical analysis indicated that, the whole goodness of fit in SEM meet the criteria, indicating that SEM is suitable in analyzing the economic growth’s explicit latent factors in the study. All capital factor, education factor and human capital factor have positive impacts on service factor, production factor, textile factor and business factor. The intensity of use（IU）, impact, population, affluence and technology（IPAT）analysis and environmental Kuznets curve of the fabric, dyeing and garments industries also reveal that Taiwan’s industrial structure has changed. This is because its economic growth pattern and material usage efficiency have caught up with many developed countries.
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