دانلود رایگان مقاله رشد، توسعه انسانی، و تجارت

Abstract

This study looks at the three-way relationship between economic growth, human development, and openness to trade in a large panel of developing Asian economies. Using a theoretically motivated simultaneous equations system, we find that although human development contributes positively to economic growth, in the case of our Asian sample growth does not appear to have had a positive influence on human development. Uneven growth accompanied by lagging institutional development, preventing human capital formation, might have inhibited human development in the short to medium run. Complementary to the literature showing that growth is sustainable only when accompanied by human development, we confirm a role for trade liberalisation policies in achieving higher growth as well as human development.

4. Summary and conclusions

We set out to investigate the links between economic growth (EG), human development (HD), and openness to trade (OT) for twelve Asian economies between 1970 and 2011. An empirical strategy based on theoretically motivated simultaneous equations framework, allowed us to test the interrelationships between the three variables of interest. Our results confirmed that economic growth, human development, and openness are interrelated. While openness to trade can have a positive impact on both economic growth and human development, we also find that economic growth alone does not have a positive impact on human development in our sample countries. However, human development can positively contribute to furthering economic growth. Thus, we find evidence of only a unidirectional positive link between human development and economic growth. Given the literature, reviewed above, the lack of support for a positive link between EG and HD warrants further discussion. One explanation could be that growth is not immediately helping human capital formation, and may be why we observe no positive effect on HD. This style of argument follows from both Tabellini's (2010) discussion of the importance of imbedded cultural factors in good governance and from work by Acemoglu et al. (2005), who focus on the development of institutional quality. Such deep, long-run affects may not previously have been picked up given the previous scarcity of long-run economic data and adequate econometric techniques. Although our data set does not allow us to control explicitly for institutional quality, our inclusion of the infant mortality variable suggests a link to how good institutions (in this case adequate public health planning) may mitigate the negative effects of EG on human capital formation and HD. In support of such an argument, we find that the negative human development effects of growth tend to disappear in our robustness checks, where we use system GMM estimation, and when the HD equation is correctly identified by the inclusion of infant mortality.