Empirical Analysis on the sources of economic growth : comparative analysis between the Asian newly industrialized countries and Eastern European countries in transition

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In this research project, we conducted the analyses on the change of industrial structure, income distribution, productivity, international capital flows, and environmental problems associated with economic development.First, concerning the change of industrial structure, we found the decline of agricultural sector and the expansion of industrial sector associated with the increase of income level in East Asia as well as the previous studies, which is evidenced not only by the descriptive data analysis but also by the panel data analysis.Second, we investigated the Kuznets curve hypothesis in Asia and the Pacific countries. Upon our empirical results, we however could not support the Kuznets curve hypothesis whose results appear to be not robust. Moreover, we also analyzed the equality in general in East Asia in relation to income distribution, especially focusing upon the democratization level. Our descriptive data analysis shows that the positive association between income level and … More democratization level in Japan, South Korea and Thailand whilst the democratization level has been relatively lower in Singapore, Malaysia and China compared with other developing countries with the similar income levels.Third, our productivity analysis, including growth accounting and regression analysis, shows the steady increase of TFP for South Korea and Thailand over time which is somewhat different from the pessimistic views of Krugman(1994).Our empirical analysis for environmental issues implies the possibility of further increase of energy consumption and emission of CO_2, and the degradation of environmental and natural resources associated with further economic growth in East Asia : to these issues, the environmental policies in the region will be increasingly important.Lastly, we investigated the role of international capital flows for the East Asian economic development. Our empirical analysis shows that international capital flows played the important role for the rapid economic growth in East Asia at least until the regional currency crisis in 1997-1998. Therefore, the recovery of economic growth in East Asia after the currency crisis also may depend on the resume of international capital flows whose implication is the same as Barro(2001). Moreover, we collected the macroeconomic data and statistics in Eastern European countries in transition throughout this research project whose analysis will be conducted from now on. Less