Development Economics and the Development of China's Central and Western Regions in the 21st Century

Author: Compiler: Chen Wenke
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-02-12
Features: Only when an economic development carrier promotes economic growth and the improvement of economic quality in the sense of economic development mentioned above can we say it has fulfilled its core supporting role. When a certain carrier has brought significant changes in these two aspects, we say that type of economic development carrier is the core carrier of this period of economic development. Therefore, we can take economic growth and the improvement of economic quality as the evaluation criteria for the core status of economic development carriers.
II. Types and Evolution Patterns of Economic Development Carriers
As the core supporting platform for economic development, economic development carriers encompass both productivity and production relations. From the perspective of productivity, they can be divided into factor carriers, industrial carriers, and regional carriers; from the perspective of production relations, they can be categorized as ownership carriers and socio-economic relationship carriers. From a historical and developmental perspective, each type of carrier has its own evolutionary process and patterns. Understanding and grasping these patterns is of great significance for analyzing the economic development of a country or region.
(I) Factor Carriers
In terms of production factors, labor, land, capital, and knowledge are all indispensable for economic development. Economic development must rely on the increase in quantity and improvement in quality of these factors, as well as their effective allocation. However, it cannot be denied that each of these factors has played the role of a core supporting platform at different stages of economic development, which can be respectively referred to as physical carriers, land carriers, capital carriers, and knowledge carriers. Physical carriers rely on the input of human labor, specifically the physical strength of workers, to drive economic growth and promote changes in the economic structure. Physical carriers are platforms built through the accumulation of human labor. In primitive and slave societies, physical carriers played a core supporting role in their economic development. Therefore, from a historical perspective, physical carriers are the carriers of economic development. People rely on physical strength to labor and hunt; slave societies often enslaved the physical strength of defeated enemies, extracting surplus value in the form of forced labor.