On January 17, the first lecture of the Frontiers of Digital Economy Lecture Series was held by the Institute of Economics, School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University. Themed with the value basis of distribution based on contributions of data elements, it was delivered by Cai Jiming, responsible professor of Economics in the School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, and hosted by Li Daokui, professor of the Department of Finance, School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University.
Prof. Li introduced the scheduled lectures and Prof. Cai’s new value theory of distribution based on contributions of production factors. He pointed out that profound changes have taken place in human economic activities. The emerging fourth industry is an industry engaged in information processing separated from the tertiary industry, for example, the metaverse, a hot topic of conversation recently, is also the information economy in its essence. Therefore, economic theories should be innovated and developed with the times. According to the series of important speeches of Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, he emphasized the necessity of adhering to the basic principles and methods of Marxism. Over the past 150 years since the publication of Capital: Critique of Political Economy, great changes have taken place in human economic activities, and specific conclusions should be continuously updated in accordance with the basic principles and methods of Marxism. These principles are equally applicable in the era of digital economy.
In his lecture, Prof. Cai started with an overview of the transformation of China’s distribution system since the reform and opening up and the innovation in the theory of distribution based on contributions of production factors in China, and introduced the General Theory of Value which is the theoretical basis of distribution based on contributions of production factors. This theory argues that the economic value of a good or service is determined by the total amount of “socially necessary labor” required to produce it. It organically combines the creation of use value with the formation of value. The value of a commodity, the value created by the unit of labor and the value created by total sectoral labor are positively related to the level of comprehensive productivity. In addition to labor factor, the factors that affect comprehensive productivity include non-labor factors such as capital, land, technology, management, knowledge, and data, which are involved in value creation. Specifically, the value based on the contributions of data elements is created through three ways: the initial stock of data, the labor of collecting and processing data in the early stage, and the labor of processing data in the current period.
Prof. Cai mentioned the various forms of distribution by entities that collect, develop and use data elements, for example, laborers engaged in data analysis, average skilled laborers paid according to their work. Moreover, engineering and technical personnel engaged in complex labor take shares of distribution by means of annual salary and special allowance, and enterprises engaged in data collection, processing, and development calculate and evaluate the contributions of their production functions to data elements, and trade their data products and related services in the market to get paid. Prof. Cai’s research provides a theoretical basis for the establishment of China’s data factor market, the improvement of the mechanism for distribution based on contributions of data elements, and the healthy development of the digital economy.
The Institute of Economics of Tsinghua University will hold eight lectures on the frontier of digital economy in the next two weeks. This Lecture Series is supported by Sina Finance, NetEase Finance, Chinese Headlines and KeAi’s Journal of Digital Economy. The first lecture was well received, attracting 417,000 total viewers on the three online platforms.
