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As a kind of capital, intermediate inputs play an important role that cannot be ignored in the process of production. Their coefficient size reflects a country's economic growth mode. Current mainstream economic growth theories only consider the value added production function, rather than gross output production function, thus ignoring the role of intermediate inputs in the production process and the evaluation of economic efficiency. This paper is based on the statistical characteristics, basic model and empirical test of the basic paradigm. From the perspective of statistical characteristics, China's intermediate inputs coefficients are significantly higher than that of U.S. and Japan and other developed countries. The energy consumption per unit GDP is far over the world average level, which shows that the characteristic of China's economic growth is of extensive growth mode. By using theoretical derivation and numerical simulation, this paper has drawn the conclusion that a country's economic growth mode is related to the intermediate inputs elasticity of substitution, value added rate (VAR), technical level, and some other parameters. Firstly, there exists substitution rather than complementary linkage between primary investment and intermediate inputs. Secondly, economic growth rate shows negative correlation with the size of the elasticity of substitution of intermediate inputs, and the greater, the slower, and vice versa. Thirdly, inverted U shape shows that with the increase of intermediate inputs rate, the equilibrium output increases first and then decreased. In other words, there exists an optimal VAR. In the empirical analysis by using data of China, U.S., Japan and Brazil, the paper proves that there are obvious differences in the elasticity of substitution of intermediate inputs among different countries at their different stages during development. On the one hand, there is a different elasticity of substitution at different stage for a country with a certain independence, and the elasticity of substitution of U.S. is much higher than that of China. On the other hand, there is deviation between the actual VAR and the optimal VAR among these countries, and the deviation of China and Brazil is much larger than that of U.S. and Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]