This thesis estimates the contributions of the export of four mainstream industries, namely, the chemistry, the textile, the plastic & rubber manufacturing and the mechanics and electronics industries, to Taiwan’s economic growth.
The empirical equations consists of an augmented production function which has incorporated the export of the four industries in addition to labors and capitals as input, and one equation representing the export demand and one representing the export supply are combined to form a simultaneous equation system. By using annual data covering the period between 1972 and 2003 to estimate the simultaneous equations, we adopt three estimation techniques-ordinary least squares(OLS), two-stage least squares methods(2SLS), three-stage least squares methods(3SLS), respectively.
The estimated results have shown that labor and capital contributes significantly toward economic growth during the entire period, while the contributions of the four industries varies depending on the stage of the economic development. The more recent emphasis on the mechanics and electronics industries outperformed the other four industries in the study in contributing economic growth.