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GTAP Resources: Resource Display

GTAP Resource #1257

"High-Tech Industries Development and Its Impact on Energy Use and the Environment of Taiwan "
by Lin, Shih-Mo


Abstract
Technological progress has been widely considered as one of the most important sources of economic growth. R&D investment and R&D spillovers, on the other hand, have been demonstrated to be the major driving forces of productivity growth and cost reduction for many industries (for example, Griliches, 1992; Bernstein, 1997; Ogagiri and Kinukawa, 1997). The rapid growth of Taiwan¡¦s high-tech industries in the last fifteen years basically supports this observation. It is believed that the promotion and development of high-tech industries by the Taiwanese government in the past two decades has been one of the most important factors that maintain Taiwan with an above-average rate of economic growth.
However, investment on R&D activities and consequently the development of high-tech industries might inevitably accompanied by a promotion of energy consumption, and hence the deterioration of the environment. Additionally, it is not always guaranteed that investing in high-tech industries will certainly improve the performance of the economy. R&D investment and the associated spillover effects can contribute to the growth of productivity for industries. But investing R&D in specific industries may also crowd out other industries¡¦ investment and weaken their competitive edge over attracting productive resources. Therefore, targeting on high-tech industries might eventually result in the reallocation of productive resources among sectors and, hence, affect the performance, energy consumption, and the environment of the whole economy.
This paper explores energy use, environmental performance, resource allocation, as well as economic performance issues of the Taiwanese economy resulting from an additional high-tech R&D investment through a multi-stage investigation process. In the first stage, we examine the inter-relationship between energy use, environmental performance, high-tech industries development and economic performance in Taiwan over the past two decades. In the second stage, we estimate a set of cost functions to examine the contributions and channels of R&D investment and inter-industry R&D spillovers for some major manufacturing industries. It is interesting to see how and to what extent high-tech R&D investment have contributed to the reduction in cost for manufacturing industries. For the purpose of finding out how a sector is affected by other sectors¡¦ R&D activity, inter-sectoral technology flow matrices for several years are also established to figure out which sectors are the most important sources of R&D spillover for a specific sector. In the last stage, the estimation results from the previous stage are fitted into a multi-sector computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to examine the effects of high-tech R&D investment and spillovers on energy use, environmental performance, resource allocation and economic performance of the Taiwanese economy.


Resource Details (Export Citation) GTAP Keywords
Category: 2003 Conference Paper
Status: Published
By/In: Presented at the 6th Annual Conference on Global Economic Analysis, The Hague, The Netherlands
Date: 2003
Version:
Created: Lin, S. (4/30/2003)
Updated: Bacou, M. (4/30/2003)
Visits: 2,626
No keywords have been specified.


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