Through the remarkable growth of over a decade China's rural industry has already become an important pillar of its national economy. The primary goal of this dissertation is to place China's rural industry in a historical and a market economic perspective in an efforts to link its rapid development and its economic performance to its market-oriented characteristic, and to analyze its productive efficiency at firm-level, in order to demonstrate that firms operating in a competitive market economic environment should have better economic performance. / Using 1988-1992 data of 500 rural non-agricultural enterprises, which are collected from four counties of Sichuan province by author, and using stochastic frontier production function approach, this dissertation primarily examines technical efficiency, factor productivity growth, and economies of scale for sample firms with two dimensions: ownership (township, village or private ownership) and sector (manufacturing and its sub-sectors, construction or service). According to the empirical analysis, it is found that, at least for the sample firms, China's rural industry has (1) higher technical efficiency, measured by both its level and its distribution, than that of their counterparts in China's state sector and in typical developing countries; (2) much faster growth rate of total factor productivity than that of China's state and urban collective sectors; (3) greater labor output elasticity and constant returns to scale; and (4) significant labor-capital substitution effect in most cases. It also finds that when output is essentially determined by the capacity of engineering facilities, relatively larger-sized firm groups with higher capital intensity have better technical efficiency; on the contrary, in relatively labor-intensive sectors, the smaller-sized firm groups perform better, which is consistent with the finding by other economists that there does not exist obvious bivariate relationship between firm size and relative technical efficiency. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-07, Section: A, page: 2794. / Major Professor: James Cobbe. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_77487 |
| Contributors | Song, Xiaojiang., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 229 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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