China’s Pursuit of Environmentally Sustainable Development: Harnessing the New Engine of Technological Innovation
| dc.creator | Jin, Wei | |
| dc.creator | Zhang, ZhongXiang | |
| dc.date | 2017-04-01T19:37:05Z | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2026-07-09T10:19:00Z | |
| dc.description | Whether China continues its business-as-usual investment-driven, environment-polluting growth pattern or adopts an investment and innovation-driven, environmentally sustainable development holds important implications for both national and global environmental governance. Building on a Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans growth model that features endogenous technological change induced by R&D and knowledge stock accumulation, this paper presents an exposition, both analytically and numerically, of the mechanism underlining China’s economic transition from an investment-driven, pollution-intensive to an investment and innovation-driven, environmentally sustainable growth path. We show that if R&D technological innovation is incorporated into China’s growth mechanism, then at some tipping point in time when marginal welfare gain of R&D for knowledge accumulation becomes equalized with that of investment for physical asset deployment, China’s economy will launch capital investment and R&D simultaneously and make a transition to a sustainable growth path along which consumption, capital investment, and R&D have a balanced share of 5: 4: 1, consumption, capital stock, and knowledge stock all grow at a rate of 4.9%, and environmental quality improves at a rate of 2.5%. In contrast, if R&D technological innovation is not harnessed as a new growth engine, then China’s economy will follow its business-as-usual investment-driven growth path along which standalone accumulation of dirty physical capital stock will lead to an more than 200-fold increase in environmental pollution. | |
| dc.identifier | doi:10.22004/ag.econ.232926 | |
| dc.identifier | https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/232926/files/NDL2016-024.pdf | |
| dc.identifier | http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/232926 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/617529 | |
| dc.language | eng | |
| dc.publisher | ||
| dc.source | http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/232926 | |
| dc.title | China’s Pursuit of Environmentally Sustainable Development: Harnessing the New Engine of Technological Innovation | |
| dc.type | Text |