Page 290 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 4

STS587 Guangwu C.

The impacts of digitalisation on China’s
economic system
Guangwu Chen
The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

Abstract
This paper aims to quantify the impacts of digitalisation on China’s economic
system within the global boundary from production, consumption, and
income perspectives. The key work we are going to carry out as follows: (1)
We present a new industrial classification system by disaggregating the
digitalised sector from related sectors and then filling the data of the new
sector and also the numbers with each sector. The data are from various
sources including yearbooks, digitalisation development reports and related
databases. (2) We insert the new digital sector into China’s economic system
using a global boundary input-output table focusing on China system. We
restructure the global multi-regional input-output table into two regions –
China and rest of the world (RoW) and extended the new MRIO table with a
new digital sector to show the digital production supply chain. (3) We use
Leontief demand-driven model and Ghosh supply-driven model to
quantifying production of the new goods and services, consumption from
consumers and the labour and capital income. This integrated study plans to
give a whole picture for assessing the size and growth of the digital economy
and its possible contributions to households welfare.

Keywords
Digitalisation; economic system; multi-regional input-output table

1. Introduction
United Nations has highlighted the sustainable consumption coupled with
challenges of environmental and social changes in Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs). The ever-growing digital economy poses new challenges for
China to achieve a sustainable future since many consumptions through the
internet-based companies has not yet to be found sustainable. Chinese
government has regarded the digital economy as the future in terms of
improvement to existing industry and growth of new ones. However, in order
to catch up with the fast pace of development in digital markets and related
companies, the regulations safeguarding the environmental and social
outcomes are urgently required to update with evidence-based supports.
The quantification of footprint linking to direct, indirect and induced
effects for internet-based companies has not been comprehensively
investigated in previous research (Cheng et al. 2019). The direct effects

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