1978年改革開放以來, 中國政府在公共資本支出方面投入大量的金額, 包括基礎建設、教育及研發。這些公共資本對於製造業的生產力會有何影響? 對於他們的生產成本會有何影響? 這些都是很重要的研究課題。在本研究中, 我們引用中國製造業由1998到2006年的1,371,616個廠商的樣本資料, 再利用傳統的成本函數及考慮企業的固定效果下, 來估計公共資本對於製造業生產成本的影響; 然後,再進一步推估公共資本對於企業要素投入之間的關係是替代或是互補。研究結果發現, 教育支出與基礎建設對於企業的生產成本有顯著減少的效果, 而且前者的效果更明顯; 但是, 政府研發支出對於企業成本的影響則不顯著。

Since 1978, China government has spent a huge amount on public capital, including infrastructure, education, and R&D. It is important to know whether those expenditures on public capital have a positive impact on improving manufacturing firms’ productivity and thus reducing their production cost. In this study, we applied a data set with 1,371,726 sample points from the manufacturing sector of China from 1998 to 2006 with a traditional cost function to estimate the impact of public capital on firms’ production cost, with a firm-level fixed effect. Then we estimate the substitutability of public capital and private inputs. We found that both education and infrastructure have a significant impact on reducing production cost for manufacturing firms, while education expenditure has a larger effect. On the other hand, R&D expenditure has little effect on reducing production cost.