ABSTRACT
China’s continuingly high growth over the past two decades has attracted a lot of
attention. In particular, a vast literature has focused on the understanding of that
growth.1 While working on China’s economic statistics, researchers have
confronted a major problem, i.e., Chinese statistical system does not report data
on capital stock. As a result, researchers have often used gross investment figures
as a proxy of capital formation in China. This is obviously problematic. Some
researchers have also attempted to derive their own data. The methods involved
vary considerably. So do the results. The objective of this study is to improve
over previous work. Specifically, this chapter employs the recently released
official accounting figures to derive capital stock series for China and its thirty
regions. A review of the literature is presented in Section 2.1. This is followed by
discussion of the methodology in Section 2.2 and new estimates in Section 2.3.
The relationship between capital formation and growth in the Chinese economy
is examined in Section 2.4. Finally, summary comments are reported in the
conclusions.
