Scale Effect of Data,Structural Change and Productivity Growth
One of the key distinctions between the digital economy and the industrial economy is that data has become a new type of production factor.Data serves as the core engine that drives the deep development of the digital economy and significantly transforms the economic growth model and productivity development path,which brings new opportunities for profound industrial upgrades and the development of new quality productive forces.Based on the non-rivalry and positive externality of data,this paper systematically studies the macroeconomic effects of data on structural change,income distribution and productivity growth from a novel theoretical perspective that data changes the properties of returns to scale.Existing studies emphasize that factor structure may change industrial structure and income distribution through the mechanism of substitutions between different industries or between different factors,induced by changes in the relative output prices of industries with different levels of factor intensity or in the relative costs of different factors.Data,as a new type of factor,has similar effects.However,different from traditional factors,data is non-rivalry and shapes positive externality.Existing literature has not fully studied the importance of these characteristics.This paper incorporates data into a standard multi-sector dynamic general equilibrium model with factor structure.In the model,data forms different extents of scale effect in different industries,and through this novel mechanism,it can drive structural change.This paper finds that once the amount of data exceeds a certain level,it exhibits different degrees of scale effect on industries with varying levels of factor intensity,which can cause changes in industrial structure and income distribution,and promote productivity growth.The mechanism may even change the direction of structural change and present a new economic form that unifies efficiency and equity,if the new industry has larger scale effect of data and higher labor intensity than the traditional industry,and the elasticity of substitution between outputs of both industries is large.For industries with strong local scale effect of data,the government should implement more active fiscal subsidies or tax cuts,and promote innovation and development under normalized supervision.For industries with weak local scale effect of data,the government should enforce stronger protection of data property right and data privacy and moderately strengthen income redistribution.This paper proposes that data changes not only the factor structure but also the return to scale in different industries.Even if the technology and factor structure stay invariant and the preference is homothetic,the growth of the scale of factor and output can still drive the transformation of the industrial structure and the evolution of income distribution.This paper contributes to existing literature by firstly showing that the scale effect of data can be a new driving force of structural change,which offers novel perspectives to understand the trends of structural transformation in the era of the digital economy,and derives policy implications for the government to promote industrial upgrades and the development of new quality productive forces.
data factorstructural changenew quality productive forceslabor income sharedigital economy
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