品质升级的衡量与评价——基于对转型时期我国耐用品的实证分析

The Measurement and Evaluation of Quality Growth——The Analysis on Durable Goods in China's Transition Period

品质升级是一个常见现象,认识品质升级的基础是如何衡量品质升级速度。如果直接用价格来衡量品质升级就会有所偏差,而品质恩格尔曲率则提供了一个良好的研究工具和研究视角。本文首先测算了我国各类耐用品的品质恩格尔曲率,然后,以品质恩格尔曲率为工具变量估计1998～2006年我国各类耐用品的品质升级速度。分析结果表明,我国各类耐用品品质都有升级的特征,但是品质升级速度在不同耐用品之间存在明显的差异。

Quality growth is a common phenomenon,and the basis of knowing it is how to measure the quality growth velocity.If taking use of price to measure quality growth directly, there will be some errors.Fortunately,the quality Engel curve gives us a useful tool and good viewpoint to estimate the quality growth.This paper calculates the quality Engel curves of many durable goods in China.Then, using quality Engel curve as an instrument variable, this paper estimates the quality growth velocities of these durable goods from 1998 to 2006.The analysis re- sults show that most of durable goods have quality growth,but there exist some obvious differ- ences between different durable goods' quality growth velocities.