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- Standards (2) (entfernen)
Economists have been searching for the sources of economic growth since the end of the 18th century. For Adam Smith the division of labour and the accumulation of capital were causes for the increasing wealth of nations. The Austrian-American economist Joseph Alois Schumpeter further established that innovations in products and processes are prerequisites for economic growth:
»The fundamental drive that starts up the capitalist machine and keeps it running comes from the new consumer goods, the new production and transport methods, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organisation, which capitalist entrepreneurship creates.«
Building on these fundamental ideas, during the 1950s American Robert M. Solow – later a Nobel prize winner – developed the first formal mathematical model of economic growth. Solow was able to use a simple model to Show that economic growth within the USA could be described by three determinants: an increase in capital (e.g. machinery and infrastructure), an increase in labour, and technical progress. Later other economists were able to further refine Solow‘s growth theory. While technical progress was accepted during the early years as a fact, it became ever easier to theoretically describe and quantify its causes. The central idea of these new models is that the state and
businesses invest in research and development, thus continually stimulating economic growth through new products and production methods.
The paper addresses the role of technical standards in bilateral trade relationship between the European Union (EU) and China. Traditional aggregate demand functions for imports and exports have been applied to estimate the effects of national and international standards. The panel dataset covers 14 years (1995–2008) and 36 two-digit technological fields based on the International Classification of Standards (ICS). The results indicate negative effects of purely national Chinese standards but positive effects of Chinese international standards for European exports. European standards and European standards aligned with international standards have a positive impact on exports and imports. Based on these results, we conclude that both China and the EU should increase their efforts to harmonise national standards.