his paper uses the dual approach to growth accounting to examine the role of total
factor productivity (TFP) in recent Chinese growth. Most previous growth accounting
studies on China have followed the primal approach, which depends heavily on the
national income accounts (NIA) data. Unfortunately, despite efforts to overcome them,
Chinese NIA data suffer from considerable problems, which in turn affect the primal
approach growth accounting results. The dual approach, in contrast, allows independent
price information to play a role. Recent research on Chinese TFP has focused on the
following two questions: (a) How significant has TFP’s role been in post-reform Chinese
growth? (b) Has TFP growth rate slowed down in more recent years? This paper offers
the following answers to these questions: (a) The TFP growth rate for mainland China for
the entire 1978-2002 period has been 2.26 percent per annum; and (b) the TFP growth
rate has experienced some slow down, from a per annum average of 4.59 percent during
1978-84 to 3.21 percent in the more recent years of 1991-2002.