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This dissertation focuses on assessing the sustainability of China’s long-term economic growth. The evaluation is performed, first, by examining economic and social issues from the past thirty years that shape China to where it is now, and second, by taking an empirical approach in understanding what factors are critical to China’s economic growth. The empirical model framework consists of three blocks representing the main areas of development in China: economic growth, health and environmental development, and the model is estimated with two-stage least squares methodology. We identify strong, simultaneous feedback between economic growth and health development. The estimation results show that continued improvements in the health status of Chinese workers are important to support stronger economic growth in China. Environmental stress is detrimental to China’s long-term health status, which indirectly reduces the country’s long-term economic potential. We test the robustness of our model, and confirm that, the proposed model setup produce a set of forecast values that are closer to the actual values than a model without health- and environmental-related variables. / Economics

No / The article examines the contribution of financial development to poverty reduction in developing countries. Building on earlier research which has established links between financial development and economic growth, and between economic growth and poverty reduction, the article tests for a causal process linking financial sector growth and poverty reduction. The empirical results indicate that, up to a threshold level of economic development, financial sector growth contributes to poverty reduction through the growth-enhancing effect. The impact of financial development on poverty reduction will be affected, however, by any change in income inequality resulting from financial development.

y / This study examined economic well-being of sub-national units in India since the economic reforms. For this purpose, the study constructed well-being index for 17 major states of India for the period 1981–2011 based on five broad dimensions. Our results showed that the economic well-being of states has declined since the reforms. The interstate disparities have increased and the states (except Punjab and West Bengal) which performed well prior to the reforms continued to perform well in the post-reform years too. In addition, our regression results for the high well-being and low well-being states revealed that the reforms have benefited more developed high well-being states, rather than low well-being states. While human capital was found significantly and positively related to per capita incomes in both groups of the states, financial development was positively related in high well-being states, but a negative association was visible in the low well-being states.

Yes / A large literature exists on the relationship between financial development and economic growth. The role of government and public banks in building this relationship has however, remained contentious. In this study in a sub-national level of analysis in the context of large emerging economy, India we raise the question what is the relative impact of public banks in economic growth in the lagging regions vis-à-vis leading regions? Do they matter more than the private and foreign banks? To address these problems, we apply dynamic GMM panel estimator on an unbalanced panel dataset drawn from 25 Indian states covering period 1996/97 to 2008/09. Although our study is in the Indian context, it is relevant for developing countries for mainly two reasons: government ownership of banks has been widely prevalent in developing countries and in many large countries in a federation set-up inter-state differences may exist with multiple ownership of the financial sector.

This dissertation is comprised of four chapters. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to economic growth and discusses the topics covered in each of the following chapters along with some main results therein. In Chapter 2, I develop a dynamic general equilibrium of innovation and imitation in which once a higher quality good is developed, there is an exogenously given rate at which the good is targeted for imitation. However, the innovator can undertake expenditure to protect the good from imitation and thereby lower the effective probability of imitation. It is shown that the total expenditure toward property right protection is inversely related to the cost of property right protection and the effectiveness of the property right system. Moreover, a subsidy that reduces the per unit cost of property right protection leads to an increase in the intensity of innovation. In the long run, the economy exhibits a constant steady state growth. I further show that an improvement in the efficiency of the property right system has an ambiguous effect on overall consumer welfare. Chapter 3 develops a two-good, closed economy model, that provides a possible explanation for the existence of misallocation of resources and examines the long-run consequences. In the model, inefficiencies arise as a result of lobbying by firms to establish or prevent barriers to the competitive allocation of factors of production (labor). First, I show that the extent of the inefficiency is determined by the relative lobbying power of the firms. The inefficiencies lead to a static welfare loss, which increase in the relative lobbying power of firms seeking to establish barriers. I further show that if the relative lobbying power of firms seeking the barriers is large, the economy will end up producing a ``wrong'' mix of goods in the long-run, relative to the perfectly competitive equilibrium. The resulting welfare loss depends on the elasticity of substitution between the two goods, and in the case when the two goods are poor substitutes, the total utility may go to zero in the long-run. In Chapter 4, I apply the model of lobbying developed in Chapter 3 to understand the link between misallocation of resources, international trade and economic growth. Misallocation leads to the possibility that the benchmark competitive free trade equilibrium is not achieved. This leads to a reduction in trade volume and consequently to welfare losses even for a country without domestic barriers. Further, domestic barriers cause a reduction in output growth in the short run. In the long run, however, there is a convergence to the competitive growth rates. / Ph. D.