Is the Export-led Growth Hypothesis Enough to Account for China's Growth?

One of the missing pieces preventing us from understanding recent Chinese economic development is the role played by openness and capital accumulation in this process. The question is whether the sharp economic growth that the Chinese economy has experienced is another case of export-led growth due to the open-door policy or whether, on the contrary, this growth has been caused by high domestic savings and investment rates (and the consequent capital accumulation). To answer this question, we employed an empirical framework of the cointegrated vector autoregressive model. The empirical results show that both investment (in physical capital and R&D) and exports, as well as the exchange rate policy, are relevant factors in explaining China's long-run economic growth over the past 4 decades.