Summary:
The digital economy has brought extensive and profound changes to social and economic activities, which in turn have important and far-reaching effects on macroeconomic operations. A global low inflation occurred almost at the same time as the emergence of the digital economy. In recent years, the international literature on the impact of the digital economy on inflation has gradually increased, but unfortunately there is a dearth of relevant domestic literature. Studying how the digital economy affects China's inflation is of great practical significance for judging the long-term trend of China's inflation and improving macro-adjustment policies. Based on the literature, this paper explores the mechanism through which the digital economy affects China's inflation and analyzes the short-term dynamic characteristics of China's inflation against the background of the digital economy. Compared with the literature, the main contributions of this paper are as follows. First, Chinese data are used to empirically test the relationship between the digital economy and inflation, enriching the relevant empirical literature. Second, this paper empirically tests the channels and verifies the mechanism through which the digital economy affects China's inflation. Third, this paper analyzes the characteristics of the short-term dynamic response of inflation to monetary policy shocks under the digital economy, and provides a reference for improving macro-policy adjustments. Based on the theoretical framework of Riksbank (2015) and the actual situation of China's digital economy, this paper summarizes and determines that the digital economy suppresses inflation through three channels: the low price growth of digital products and services, improved productivity, and e-commerce platform competition. The fixed-effect panel model is used for empirical testing. This paper uses the CPI and PPI growth rates released by the National Bureau of Statistics to measure inflation, and uses the annual digitalization degree index in the Peking University Digital Financial Inclusion Index as the proxy variable of the digital economy. The change rate of the Zhongguancun electronic product price index, the change rate of total factor productivity in each province, and the proportion of e-commerce enterprises in each province are used as the proxy variables of digital product price, productivity, and e-commerce platform competition, respectively. The empirical results show that the inhibitory effect of the digital economy on inflation and its three influence channels are basically confirmed in China. Among them, the digital product channel mainly acts on the annual growth rate of the PPI, the e-commerce platform channel mainly acts on the annual growth rate of the CPI, and the productivity channel has an effect on the annual growth rate of both the CPI and PPI. To explore the short-term dynamic characteristics of inflation in the context of the digital economy, this paper takes the CPI released by the National Bureau of Statistics as the offline price index, the consumer price index based on online data constructed by Liu Taoxiong et al. (2019) as the online price index (iCPI), and the weighted average of the CPI and iCPI to construct a comprehensive price index (JCPI) based on the proportion of online retail sales to the total retail sales of consumer goods. The VEC model is used to simulate the response of the CPI, iCPI, and JCPI to monetary policy shocks. It is found that the iCPI has the shortest response time to interest rate shocks, the CPI has the longest response time, and the JCPI is in between. The iCPI has the greatest response to money supply and interest rate shocks, followed by the JCPI, and finally, the CPI. As a result, the expansion of online sales has increased the sensitivity of overall inflation to monetary policy. However, due to the sample size, this conclusion needs to be viewed with caution. The conclusions of this paper have three policy implications. First, in view of the significantly different operating characteristics of online and offline prices, the need to construct a broader range of price indices that cover the characteristics of the digital economy is increasing, and it is necessary to improve the statistical accounting of China's price indices as soon as possible. Second, monetary policy needs to pay attention to the new characteristics of and changes in inflation in the era of the digital economy. As the scale of online sales is continuing to expand, the overall price is more sensitive to monetary policy shocks, and the timing and rhythm of policy operations may need to be adjusted accordingly. Third, in the face of the current global threat of high inflation, the digital economy, as one of the few important long-term factors with an inflation-suppressing effect, continues to accelerate innovation through digital technology itself, and applies it more vigorously and on a larger scale.
刘珺, 唐建伟, 周边, 鄂永健, 王运良. 数字经济如何影响中国通货膨胀?——基于作用机理和动态特征的实证分析[J]. 金融研究, 2023, 513(3): 1-19.
LIU Jun, TANG Jianwei, ZHOU Bian, E Yongjian, WANG Yunliang. How Does the Digital Economy Influence China's Inflation? Empirical Tests on the Influence Mechanism and Dynamic Characteristics. Journal of Financial Research, 2023, 513(3): 1-19.
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