教育、创新与经济增长

由于知识的非竞争性,基于R&D的内生增长模型存在规模效应,即人口数量越大,从事R&D的人员越多,经济增长率越快。本文将R&D人员创新活动的有效时间引入知识的积累方程———“点子”生产函数,发现OECD国家科学家和工程师数量增加伴随着R&D人员创新活动的有效时间的减少,二者相互抵消,使得TFP增长率保持不变。通过校准理论模型,本文模拟了49个国家的经济增长率,发现模型对经济增长率跨国数据的解释能力明显强于Lucas模型和Romer模型。如果利用模型对跨国经济增长率的模拟值与真实值之间的残差平方和来评判模型的优劣,则本文模型对Lucas模型和Romer模型至少分别改进了20%和59%。

Education, Innovation and Economic Growth

Because of the non-rivalry of knowledge, the R&D based endogenous growth model implies the scale effect, which means the larger the population, and the more the number of R&D employee, the faster the economy grows. The motivation of this paper is thus to bridge the gap between the R&D based theoretic model and the empirical facts on scale effect. By introducing the effective time of innovation activity of researchers into the idea production function adopted by original R&D model, we can get two types of equilibria of economic growth, one with scale effect, the other without it. We find the necessary condition for the existence of the steady state growth and the existence of the scale effect in the steady state. To test the model, we calibrate the model and simulate the growth rate of 49 countries. We find that the model in this paper improves the Lucas model and Romer model at least by 20% and 59% in the sense that we take the sum of the squared error between the simulated data and the real data as the criteria for the assessment of the model.