Volume 12, Issue 4

The minimum wage policy should take into account production costs of enterprises and welfare benefits of families. This paper describes the pass-through process of the minimum wage costs in the enterprise sector and the household sector by building a theoretical model, investigates the impact of the minimum wage adjustment on urban household consumption utility and its price pass-through mechanism from the perspective of living costs based on several sets of databases, such as household survey, supermarket prices and industrial enterprises for the first time, and further estimates the net welfare changes including income compensation and consumption utility loss. The findings of the study are as below: (1) The price transfer behavior of enterprises is the main cause of the loss of household consumption utility. The average wage level and labor costs of enterprises rise with the increase of minimum wages. Both the cost-price pass-through elasticity estimated based on the theoretical model and the minimum wage price elasticity coefficient obtained by empirical estimation show that the price transfer behavior of enterprises leads to the rise of final consumer prices; (2) With a 10% increase in minimum wages, the overall household living costs increase by 2.47%–6.76%, and the economic living costs increase by about 122–334 yuan per quarter, among which the living costs are most affected in terms of food, shoes and clothing; (3) Under the combined effect of income compensation and consumption utility loss, the bottom 20% of households and middle 60% of households will get 658 yuan and 469–556 yuan per quarter, respectively. The findings of this paper are conducive to improving the supporting minimum wage policy by taking a number of measures simultaneously, so as to provide a path reference for promoting the realization of Chinese modernization and expanding domestic demand for common prosperity for all.

This article constructs a dual-circulation production network framework on the basis of integrating inter-country and China’s multi-regional input-output tables, identifies the propagation and attenuation of sectoral shocks in dual-circulation production networks, and measures the effects of US-China trade frictions on the networks. The research finds that: (1) The asymmetry between domestic- and international-circulation production networks has increased, and with a few sectors becoming key sectors to dual-circulation production networks, sectoral shocks grow increasingly critical for aggregate volatility. (2) Based on the above analytical framework, the global extraction method (GEM) is adopted to simulate the GDP losses in scenarios of China-US i ndustry-wide chain interruptions, certain sectoral frictions, and supply-side and demand-side chain interruptions. The simulation finds that increasing the domestic substitution rate will reduce the value losses caused by China-US chain interruptions, which is applied for both countries. However, even if full substitution can be achieved, the value losses cannot be avoided completely in the China-US decoupling. Whether it is the demand-side chain interruptions plus insufficient market substitution in China, or the supply-side chain interruptions plus insufficient supply substitution in the US, will cause great losses to their economy.

It is of great practical significance to analyze the differences of actual tax burden value-added tax (VAT) from the perspective of industrial linkage for accelerating the construction of a modern industrial system and promoting the formation of a new development pattern. This paper explains the differences and causes of the actual VAT tax burden in the manufacturing industry from the perspective of industrial linkage. According to the research results, the closer the intermediate input connection between an industry and other industries, the lower the actual VAT tax burden it bears. The characteristics of production network have a moderating effect on the relationship between the linkage of the manufacturing industries and the actual VAT tax burden. For the industries in the center of the production network, a stable backward linkage weakens the influence of industrial linkage on their actual tax burden. It is difficult for industries located in the spillover block to reduce their tax burden by adjusting the linkage of intermediate goods. In addition, highly linked manufacturing enterprises can also reduce their actual VAT tax burden by tax avoidance, tax shifting, adjusting the types of intermediate inputs and so on. Smoothing the domestic production network of the manufacturing industry and optimizing the VAT burden bearing mechanism of each manufacturing sub-industry will help promote the stable growth of the manufacturing industry and healthy development of the macro economy in China.

The rise of robotics has brought great uncertainty to the labor market. Based on the sectoral data from 22 economies during 2008–2019, this paper explores the impact of robot application on employment. The results show that, on the whole, robot application will have complementary effects on lab or force employment, and the grouped regression by economic development level and demographic characteristics supports this conclusion, while the effect of robot application on labor force employment is significantly different by industry. Further research shows that the degree of robot use is the key factor that determines the effect of robots on employment, and the complementary effect is dominant in economies with low degree of robot application, and the subtitution effect is dominant in economies with high degree of robot application. In addition, obvious spillover effects are observed in robotic application. On the one hand, robot application will have a forward crowding– out effect and a reverse siphon effect, which drive the labor force moving from the primary industry to the secondary and tertiary industries. On the other hand, robot application will also have heterogeneous effects on the labor force employment of economies in the upstream and downstream position along the value chain through the transmission effect of the Global Value Chains (GVC). The conclusions of this paper provide some practical implications for the rational formulation of artificial intelligence plans in the context of “stabilizing employment”.

Data factors have become one of the five essential production factors, but their role in economic growth has always been ambiguous. Starting from AI technologies, this paper establishes an endogenous growth model of data factors affecting economic growth, constructs the generation path and value path of data factors, and estimates the value of new data factors at the provincial level in China from 1999 to 2018 accordingly. Based on theoretical analyses and empirical tests, it clarifies that data factors have a “two-dimensional driving effect” on China’s economic growth, that is, data factors can drive growth both directly through its own economic growth effect and indirectly by promoting technological progress. Furthermore, this paper makes three extended discussions, aiming to make a trial study on the impacts of local government big data transaction platforms on data factors and their growth effects, discuss whether it is possible to reduce the uncertainties of local economic policy based on the nature of data factors, and make a preliminary survey of the output elasticity of data factors between 1999 and 2018.

Considering that upstream monopoly will lead to an exponential increase in the loss of social welfare, this paper investigates the impact of intermediate goods tariff concession on the welfare loss of manufacturing enterprises from the perspective of input trade liberalization and effective market power. It has been discovered that input trade liberalization significantly reduces the welfare loss of manufacturing enterprises. Due to the game condition in which oligopolies check each other and small businesses “gain from fishing”, the inhibitory impact increases as market share decreases. The mechanism test demonstrates that input trade liberalization boosts the effect of technical competition and minimizes welfare loss through promoting market development degree and reducing factor distortion. In addition, this paper also finds that the effect of input trade liberalization on high monopolistic power enterprises is obviously stronger than that of low monopolistic power enterprises. Furthermore, the impact on non-high-tech industries and capital-intensive enterprises is significant, while that on high-tech industries and labor-intensive industries is not. Therefore, the welfare loss should be investigated from the dual perspective of market structure and marker power. Competitiveness has an important effect, while trade liberalization of intermediate inputs has a pivotal effect on promoting market development and improving resource allocation efficiency.