Research On The Growth Effect And Structure Effect Of Information Technology

In today's era,a new round of scientific and technological revolution,with information technology as its core,is growing up.The Internet has increasingly become the leading force of innovation driven development,profoundly changing people's production and life and promoting social development.After the economic development entered the middle income stage,China is facing multiple development tasks,such as maintaining high speed economic growth,cultivating new driving force for innovation,promoting industrial structure adjustment and upgrading,and successfully crossing the "middle income trap".We urgently need to find new development support points which can both stable growth and efficiency,also can adjust the structure and support for people's livelihood.Under this background,the theme of this paper is "the growth effect and structure effect of information technology".In the second chapter,we analyze the growth effect and the structure effect mechanism of information technology in a unified theoretical framework by building a multi-sector growth model.In our model,interdepartmental input-output linkage is the main channel for technological progress to spread from the IT-producing sectors to other non-information technology sectors through the IT-using sectors.The speed of technology diffusion is mainly influenced by three parameters: the output elasticity of information technology products to the IT-using sectors,the share of the IT-using sectors products in the intermediate product production,and the expenditure share of the IT-using sectors products in the consumption basket.Our model especially emphasizes the transmission role of the IT-using sectors in the multi-sectoral growth.Firstly,when it is used as intermediate product sector,the production efficiency of the IT-producing sectors is transmitted to the non-IT sectors by providing intermediate goods for the non-IT sectors.Secondly,as a consumer product sector,the relative price of consumer goods has been declining,improving the welfare of consumers.Thirdly,as the user of information technology products,it encourage the development of new products in IT-producing sectors.The steady-state equilibrium property of our model is good,which is in line with the generalized balanced growth path.While the total economic growth is balanced,the growth of various sectors is differentiated,which shows that the output growth of the IT-producing sectors is the fastest,the output growth of the IT-using sectors is slower,and the output growth of the non-IT sectors is the slowest.The third chapter empirically tests the contribution of information technology sectors to economic growth.Using data from China Industrial Productivity Database,we measured the contribution of the information technology sector to the growth of GDP and TFP from 1981 to 2012,using the aggregate production possibility frontier(APPF)method.We not only distinguish between the IT sectors and the non-IT sectors,but also subdivide the IT sectors into the IT-producing sectors,the IT-using in manufacturing sectors,and the IT-using in services sectors.Our study found that the contribution of the information technology sector to GDP growth and TFP mainly from the IT-producing sectors and the IT-using in manufacturing sectors.However,in terms of trends,the share of the IT-using in services sectors has increased rapidly,and the contribution share of the service sector using information technology has been higher than that of other services sectors.This provides evidence support for us to promote the use of information technology and transform traditional industries.Based on the measurement of the macro scale of growth effect of information technology,the fourth chapter further explores the micro mechanism of growth effect of information technology.In this chapter,we use the micro data from the Chinese enterprise survey from the World Bank to demonstrate the impact of access and use of the Internet on the total factor productivity of the enterprise.We mainly examine three questions:(1)Does the introduction and use of Internet significantly improve the productivity of enterprises?(2)Whether the more the Internet is used,the more obvious the productivity improvement effect will be.(3)How is the productivity effect of the Internet distributed among enterprises? Can the use of Internet help to narrow the productivity gap between enterprises? We measure the indicators of Internet use,including the way of use,usage and density of use.Our empirical results show that the productivity effect of the use of the Internet is verified regardless of the indicators used to measure Internet use,and the productivity effect increases with the increase in the density of the Internet use.We further use the quantile regression method to examine the distribution of the productivity effects of the Internet,and find that the productivity effect of the Internet is more obvious in the enterprises with lower productivity.This means that the use of the Internet in enterprises can not only improve total factor productivity in general,but also will help to reduce the productivity gap between enterprises in the long run.On the basis of the analysis of the growth effect of information technology,the fifth chapter further studies whether the growth induced by information technology has a sectoral bias,thus affecting the industrial structure.In this chapter,we use China's urban panel data to empirically analyze the industrial structure adjustment effect of the Internet.Firstly,based on the idea of structural change theory,we set up a structural change model which includes a utility function with non-homothetic preferences and a production function with the characteristics of sectoral productivity heterogeneity.From the supply side and the demand side,the mechanism of the industrial structure adjustment effect of Internet is analyzed.Secondly,Using the ratio of the output value of the tertiary industry to manufacturing industry as the dependent variable,the internet penetration as the explanatory variable and the terrain as the instrumental variable,the fixed effect estimation and the instrumental variable estimation have been carried out on the industrial structure adjustment effect of the Internet successively.From the empirical results,both fixed effect estimation and instrumental variable estimation verify the industrial structure adjustment effect of the Internet.Furthermore,we analyze the factors that influence the industrial structure adjustment effect of the Internet,and find that the level of education and urbanization is particularly important.In order to better play the industrial adjustment effect of the Internet,we should pay attention to both the hardware investment of the network infrastructure and the improvement of the soft environment of education.At the same time,we should pay attention to the study of the distribution effect of the industrial adjustment effect of the Internet in the region.