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Currently, China’s economy is in the critical phase of transforming economic development patterns and replacing old growth drivers with new ones. Whether it can successfully overcome the “middle-income trap” has become a significant issue attracting wide attention.

Driven by underlying digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing and big data, the fourth industrial revolution featuring the booming digital economy has provided significant opportunities for China’s economy to “overtake” and overcome the “middle-income trap”. The transformation of economic development pattern, the optimization of industrial structure, and the change of growth drivers, brought by the deep integration of digital and real economies are the keys to leaping over the “middle-income trap”.

From the supply side, the digital economy can improve the quality and efficiency of the supply side and promote the supply-side structural reform and economic growth from the following three aspects: First, promote the quality, efficiency and diversification of the supply system; second, promote networking, opening-up and synergy in the innovation system and third, promote the socialization, modularization and flexibility of production pattern. From the demand side, the digital economy can boost the new drivers of the “troika” of economic growth consisting of consumption, exports and investment by changing the market investment direction, promoting consumption upgrade and fostering export strengths. However, once these two attributes interact with each other, especially when data is combined with capital, the most adhesive factor in the market economy, a series of new social relations will then be produced based on the technical attribute, resulting in significant adjustments in social relations, involving both positive and negative externalities.

To overcome the “middle-income trap”, it is necessary to adapt to the laws of economic evolution and promote a fundamental change in economic growth drivers; boost the high-quality development of the digital economy by strengthening the support role of data in the digital economy; and accelerate digital industrialization and industrial digitalization to realize the integration of digital and real economies.

As China embarks upon a new era of high-quality development, it is increasingly important and imperative for China’s economic development to live up to its real nature, which is to satisfy people’s growing needs for a better life. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The paper attempts to discuss the implication of HQD and its related theoretical issues from the basic theory of economics, and literature review. It is necessary to return to Marx’s “dual character of commodity” to check the theoretical foundation of this issue, based on the duality methodology, namely, the duality of the value of use and the value of exchange.

Moving from HSG phase to HQD phase constitutes a major challenge and an arduous task that is extremely difficult both theoretically and practically. A series of new problems crop out as to the theoretical understanding and practical resolution. Fundamentally speaking, this new dynamic mechanism intrinsically requires a perfect integration of the instrumental rationality of market economy and the value-based rationality of economic development.

This new momentum requires a perfect match between the instrumental rationality of market economy and the value-based rationality of economic development.

During the Communist Party of China's endeavors over the past century, China has created “two miracles,” namely, large-scale and rapid economic development and long-term social stability.

The causes for China's achieving the “two miracles” lie in the adherence to the Party's leadership as the political guarantee, the scientific theoretical guidance as the ideological guarantee, the socialist system as well as the national governance system as the institutional guarantee and giving full play of people's creativity under the Party's leadership as the driving force guarantee.

From a political economy point of view, the theoretical logic behind the creation of the “two miracles” is that the combination of the state capacity and the scaling up of markets under the Party's leadership contributes to the rapid economic development and further the long-term social stability based on the financial foundation laid by rapid economic development. The historical experience of the “Two Miracles” can be summed up as the cultivation of state capacity under the leadership of the Party, the synergy and complementarity between the central government and local governments, the combination of development planning and market mechanisms, and the coordination of selective, functional and inclusive industrial policies.

It is necessary to judge future development trends from a medium and long-term development perspective, further promote the co-evolution of the state and the market, reshape the growth regime for high-quality development, fully tap the potential of domestic demand and create a “people-centered” economic development model so as to continue the “two miracles” and achieve a miracle of high-quality development in the second century.

The purpose of this paper is based on China’s economic fundamentals. Factor input, structural optimization and institutional reform, which determine the fundamentals of China's economic development, will actively prop up long-term, sustained and stable growth of the Chinese economy and keep China's potential economic growth rate stabilized within a reasonable growth range in the long term.

The fundamentals of economic development of a country are the basic situation of economic operation determined by the country's main factors and the long-term trend thereof, and they have such characteristics as stability, internality and persistence.

Stability refers to economic operation that remains relatively stable within a reasonable growth range at a certain stage of development, and this does not rule out exceptional economic fluctuations in certain years due to the impact of unexpected short-term factors. For instance, the fundamentals of the Chinese economy during the period after the reform and opening-up are characterized by a sustained high growth rate.

Internality refers to the intrinsic quantity and quality of all factors supporting the economic development of a country, especially the quantity and quality of the factors that play a decisive role in the economic development of a country at a specific stage. For instance, demographic dividend and capital formation have bolstered the high-speed growth of the Chinese economy since the reform and opening-up.

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

At present, the Chinese economy has entered the “new normal” phase with the transformation of development stages from the low-income to the middle-income ones. Accordingly, there appear a series of innovations in development theories. Innovations involve creative destructions. Therefore, innovative development theories at the present stage either deny the prevailing principles of development economics, or deny the theories that once effectively guided development at the low-income stage, or even sublate some of the development polices which were propelled and proved effective at the beginning of the reform and opening-up. The fundamental reason is that, as the development stages evolve, there occur new development tasks, new periodical characteristics and new laws of development. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Any development theory from abroad will find it difficult to correctly guide and clarify development problems in a socialist country, such as the huge population and the extreme imbalance between the urban and the rural and among regional developments.

In conclusion, China, as a large world economy, has made innovations in its economic development theory, which indicates that it intends to perfect itself rather than seek hegemony. As the world’s second largest economy, China should adapt to the transformation and further free people’s minds instead of adhering to the old patterns of thinking. It should think over the path of development for a great world economy from the historical starting point of a large world economy and find development strategies to transform itself from a large economy to a great economy, so as to realize the dream of the Chinese nation to build a powerful country.

Only political economy studies both the relations of production and the productive forces, and only a theory combining both can correctly guide China’s economic development, which especially needs to be promoted by taking advantage of socialist economic system. Therefore, the first and foremost principle for a socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics is to insist on liberating and developing productive forces.

The neo-Kaleckian model follows the ideas of Marx, Keynes and Kalecki, that investment is a key influencing factor in the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production. Through the discussion of different forms of investment decision function, this paper constructs the analysis framework of wage-led and profit-led economic growth regimes.

The model has become an important theoretical paradigm for current Western heterodox economists regarding the research on the impact of functional income distribution on economic growth, and it has a very large impact on both theoretical and empirical research. Starting from Marx's reproduction theory, this article discusses the theoretical shortcomings of the neo-Kaleckian growth regime model.

This paper mainly focuses on three aspects: (1) the ideological legacy of “Smith's Dogma”; (2) neglecting the restrictions on income distribution from the organic composition of capital and the surplus value rate; (3) technological progress and the formation of a new long economic wave.

The authors believe that the neo-Kaleckian model unilaterally emphasizes the demand-side factors in the economy and, unconsciously or not, ignores the role of the supply-side, which makes it encounter certain limitations in explaining long-term growth. Even if some empirical conclusions are employed to bridge functional income distribution and technological progress, there is still a lack of a theoretical basis for accurately describing long-term economic changes using this model. In order to better promote high-quality economic development and accelerate the formation of a new pattern of economic development in which the domestic large-scale cycle is the mainstay and the domestic and international double cycles promote each other, the authors need to adopt a policy combination with the supply-side as the main and the demand-side as the supplement, and to work from both sides.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the internal interaction mechanism of marine scientific research and education, industrial structure upgrading and marine economic growth from a systematic perspective, based on which this work forecasts their future development trends.

In this study, a multivariate grey model is applied to the prediction of marine scientific research and education, industrial structure upgrading and marine economic growth. Considering the impact of the COVID-19 on marine development, this paper introduces the weakening buffer operator into MGM(1,m) and constructs the AWBO-MGM(1,m) model. To verify the validity and accuracy of the new model, this paper uses AWBO-MGM(1,m), MGM(1,m), GM(1,N), GM(1,1), back propagation neural network and linear regression models for simulation and prediction based on the data from 2010 to 2021, respectively.

From the theoretical perspective, the development of marine scientific research and education can accelerate industrial upgrading and promote marine economic growth by providing high-quality talents, promoting marine science and technology progress and reducing transaction costs; while the upgrading of marine industrial structure and marine economic growth can promote the development of marine scientific research and education by guiding social capital, enhancing talent demand and stimulating market vitality. From the empirical analysis, the AWBO-MGM(1,m) model can effectively deal with epidemic shocks and has higher fitting and prediction accuracy than the other five comparative models.

The government should pay attention to the construction of marine scientific research and education, so as to provide high-quality talents and advanced scientific research results for the high-quality development of marine economy. On the basis of using science and technology to firmly build the primary and secondary marine industries, the government should actively guide the labor, capital and other factors of production to the tertiary industry, thereby promoting the optimization and upgrading of marine industrial structure.

On the one hand, the interplay mechanism of marine scientific research and education, industrial structure upgrading and marine economic growth is analyzed from a systematic perspective; on the other hand, the enhanced AWBO-MGM(1,m) possesses higher forecasting performance and is applicable to the systemic multivariate forecasting problem in the presence of outstanding external shocks.