School of Finance, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, PR China.
PLoS One. 2023 Apr 10;18(4):e0284191. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0284191. eCollection 2023.
Factor price distortions and resource misallocation are important sources of productivity differences between regions. Promoting the free flow of factors of production is conducive to giving full play to the decisive role of the market in allocating resources, which is crucial to helping a country's economy develop in a high-quality and sustainable manner. This paper proposes a new approach to measuring factor market distortions and establishes the relationship between factor price distortions and a country's economic growth. This paper examines the resource misallocation and efficiency loss of 31 provinces in China from 2004 to 2020, and proposes an analytical framework for resource misallocation among regions, with which the Total Factor Productivity (TFP) and the factor price distortion of provinces in China are calculated. The calculation results indicate that the TFP of China's provinces gradually declines from the eastern coast to the western inland. The resource allocation efficiency in the eastern and central areas is higher than that in the western areas, so is the factor price, and its distortion causes nearly 6% of loss of output value in China. China's economic growth is still reliant on the increase of factor input and technological development and the improvement of resource allocation efficiency has no significant effect on growth.
要素价格扭曲和资源错配是地区间生产率差异的重要来源。促进生产要素自由流动有利于充分发挥市场在资源配置中的决定性作用，这对于帮助一个国家的经济实现高质量和可持续发展至关重要。本文提出了一种衡量要素市场扭曲的新方法，并建立了要素价格扭曲与国家经济增长之间的关系。本文考察了 2004 年至 2020 年中国 31 个省份的资源错配和效率损失，并提出了一个地区间资源错配的分析框架，据此计算了中国各省的全要素生产率（TFP）和要素价格扭曲。计算结果表明，中国各省的 TFP 从东部沿海向西部内陆逐渐下降。东部和中部地区的资源配置效率高于西部地区，要素价格也是如此，其扭曲导致中国近 6%的产值损失。中国经济增长仍依赖于要素投入的增加和技术发展，而资源配置效率的提高对增长没有显著影响。
