RIETI Discussion Paper Series 09-E-007 IT, R&D and Productivity of Chinese Manufacturing Firms1

This paper analyzes the productivity performance of Chinese manufacturing firms from 1995 to 2003 by using a large-scale firm-level dataset from the National Bureau of Statistics, Peoples Republic of China. Over this period, a large number of firms were converted to stock holding companies, and an increasing presence of foreign-owned companies further accelerated structural changes in Chinese industry sectors. It is found that such changes of ownership positively contribute to aggregate productivity growth. In addition, IT and R&D intensity is positively correlated with firm-level productivity growth. However, we cannot find a positive impact of either IT or R&D on productivity after controlling reverse causality of productivity on IT and R&D investments