数字经济发展与消费者福利水平变化——基于时间分配理论研究

Digital Economy's Development and the Change of Consumer Welfare:Based on the Theory of Time Allocation

伴随着数字经济的发展,社会中产生了大量免费或低价的数字产品。然而,在现有GDP核算体系之下,这些数字产品的价值难以被准确衡量。基于此,文章立足于数字产品的消费者剩余度量问题,提出了“GDP+数字产品消费者剩余”的数字经济核算新思路。考虑到数字产品的时间密集型特征,文章结合Becker的时间分配理论,初步尝试从时间价值角度构建数字产品消费者剩余测度模型。进一步,文章在概念上将互联网服务与数字产品等同,以互联网服务为对象,利用我国2012—2020年间居民业余上网时间数据,对数字产品的消费者剩余展开量化分析。结果发现,数字产品对消费者福利的影响呈总体扩大趋势,其在GDP中占比始终保持在5%以上,且增速远高于同期GDP增速。我国数字经济实际规模被严重低估。对数字产品价值的忽视必然会影响政府数字经济政策的有效性。另外,文章在实证过程中发现,消费者在互联网服务消费方面存在明显的鸿沟。具体来讲,高收入群体出于信息搜寻、社会资本积累和娱乐休闲目的,对互联网服务的使用时间远大于低收入群体。我国数字产品消费存在不平等问题,这在一定程度上会对消费者福利产生不利影响。因此,在精准测度数字经济规模的基础上,政府政策制定也要兼顾数字经济发展过程中的不平等问题。

With the rapid development of digital economy,there are many new and“free”digital goods in our daily life,such as Wikipedia and so on.Obviously,these digital goods brought many benefits for consumers.However,the benefits cannot be shown in the GDP calculations as the large majority of digital goods are zero priced.In order to address the issue of measurement in digital economy accounting,this paper focuses on quantifying the value of digital goods.Furthermore,we argument that the value of Internet service is equal to the value of digital goods.Based on the Becker’s theory of time allocation,Goolsbee and Klenow’s accounting model(2006),we then value the Internet services by the time consumers spent using it from 2012 to 2020 in China.The key findings are as follows:First of all,the consumer surplus generated by digital goods show an overall increasing trend,and the value of digital goods in GDP remains at more than 5%from 2012 to 2020.Especially in 2012,the value of Internet services accounts for 5%of GDP,which is higher than the level of European countries.Also,the actual development speed of the digital economy is much higher than the GDP growth rate.If the value of digital goods is lacking in the digital economy,then we are severely hampered in our ability to understand the impact of the digital economy and make policies.In addition,this paper find that there is an obvious digital divide in the use of the Internet in China.High income groups would like to pay more attention to the Internet for the purposes of information search,social capital accumulation,and entertainment in leisure time.The welfare effect of the development of the digital economy on high-income groups is significantly greater than that on low-income groups.Finally,there is a consumption inequality of digital goods.In 2018,the scale of the top 10%of China's digital goods consumption was 14 times that of the bottom 10%.And the inequality index calculated by the Theil index and the Gini coefficient is 0.36 and 0.46 respectively.Inequality will damage consumer welfare to some extent.Hence,besides accurately measuring the scale of the digital economy,the government should also take into account the inequality in the process of digital economic development.The contributions of this paper are as follows.Firstly,based on the value of digital goods,this paper proposed a new framework for the digital economic accounting,similar to the framework of GDP-B and EGDP.Secondly,digital goods essentially are time-intensive goods.In view of this,this paper focuses on the welfare enhancement brought by digital goods from the perspective of time value.Most specifically,Internet services and digital goods are two aspects of the same thing.The time spent using Internet is the sum of the time spent using the digital goods.Therefore,we can get the value of digital goods and how it's changed through time.Thirdly,inequality of time spent on the digital goods provides a new perspective to probe the consumption inequality of China in a more comprehensive and profound way.