Page 291 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 4

STS587 Guangwu C.
generated by the initial spending from consumers create additional activities
and therefore environmental impacts in the local economy. In addition, the
business-to-business transactions indirectly caused by the direct effects lead
to further ‘indirect’ environmental impact embodied in supply chains. The
income generated through digital platforms by households could be re-spent
and induce further economic and environmental impacts, which has been
largely ignored in the literature.
The digital economy also gives a boost to a free market platform such as
“Airtasker” in which temporary positions are common and individuals or
organizations contract with independent workers for short-term engagement
(i.e. Gig Economy (Friedman 2014)). Many Chinese outsource the labor work
to part-time workers or freelancers who especially for those new migration
race the price to the bottom to win the job. Debate on the digital market of
job outsourcing splits into two perspectives.
One argues that it increases the employment chances to get paid and
supplement the low-income group people. The others claim that it leads to
more individual joining the freelancing and increase the instability of the
society since this form of employment has mislabeled workers as independent
contractors and immunize employers from workplace injuries and harassment.
Freelancing also raises the concern of responsibilities of government such as
pension since the Chinese government has collected the tax from these part-
time workers. However, previous research lacks of a modeling to qualify the
employment of gig workers by converting it into a full-time equivalent unit
(an equivalent freelancer), which will be conducted during this fellowship.
Digital platforms have made online shopping prevalent and influence
subjective experiences as to make them potentially addictive activities (Chen
et al. 2019b). Several predictive factors have been identified as drivers of
compulsive online shopping including female gender, low self-esteem, low
self-regulation, negative emotional state, as well as cognitive overload. Linking
micro-scale consumer’s socio-economic and demographical characteristics
particular with mental health state to the macro-scale environmental and
social footprints would help to regulate the consumer’s behaviors towards a
sustainable consumption future.
To challenge digital economy measurement, (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-

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