| Internet economy and cross-border e-commerce have become an indispensable part of enterprises and consumers in various countries.Large-scale digitalization not only causes fundamental changes in economic theory and national economic structure but also draws the attention of all sectors of society to such initiatives as an exploration of classical trade theory,new trade theory,trade rules,and new cooperation mechanism.Scientists believe that Internet transactions and free cross-border flow of data are the key elements and necessary conditions to achieve economic growth during The Fourth Industrial Revolution.With the continuous and rapid development of the Internet and new technologies,digital products trade,which is composed of cross-border data flows is currently promoting the global flow of goods,services,labor,capital,and information,as well as changing the operation mode and business models of various enterprises.For instance,when small and medium-sized enterprises have the infrastructure and network communication services needed to access the Internet,computers or smartphones,they can reach customers all over the world and participate in the global supply chain system of goods and services at any time.Digital products trade is a broad concept that covers not only the sale of consumer goods on the Internet and the supply of online services,but also the data flow that enables global value chains,services that enable intelligent manufacturing,and numerous other electronic trading platforms and applications.However,at present,in addition to becoming a factor to promote the development of national economy,digital products trade also has been regarded as one of the increasing areas of various trade barriers and restrictive measures.These protection policies evolved from low level to high level,from tolerance to strict,and finally formed a set of targeted,systematic and rigorous data management systems around the world.This means,that the emergence of digital trade has greatly reduced the role of traditional trade barriers,resulting in large emerging economies like BRICs establishing and maintaining many new “virtual” trade barriers and data restrictive policies in order to protect their domestic markets.In this context,if BRICs countries will continue to improve digital products trade barriers or put forward more stringent data restrictive measures,it will inevitably increase the operating costs of enterprises in data-intensive industries,which will lead to the reduction of total factor productivity of the whole industry.Therefore,this paper takes BRICs countries as an example to measure the impact of digital products trade barriers on data intensive industries from the perspective of industrial economics and establish a scientific quantitative analysis framework.First of all,through combing and summarizing a large number of domestic and foreign literature and policy measures,this research makes a systematic analysis and elaboration on the specific protection policies and measures of the new and traditional digital product trade barriers adopted by BRICs countries,finds out its main characteristics and problems,and establishes the BRICs Digital Trade Barriers Database.In addition,the index system and evaluation method established by theEuropean Center for International Political Economy are used to calculate the two indexes of Restrictions on Digital Trade and Restrictions on Data to measure the degree of digital product trade protection among BRICS countries.This paper finds that according to the evaluation results of the Restrictions on Digital Trade index,BRICs countries have a structure of “one high,three medium and one low” trade protection degree,among which China has the highest level of protection,while Brazil,Russia and India have the relatively lower level of protection,while South Africa has the lowest level.According to the evaluation results of Restrictions on Data Index,China,Russia and India have the highest level of data protection among BRICs countries and are gradually improving,while South Africa and Brazil maintain a relatively low level of protection.Secondly,in order to calculate the impact of digital products trade barriers on TFP of data intensive and other industries,this paper establishes a Multidimensional Panel Data Model to make estimation.According to the previously calculated indexes,this paper constructs the comprehensive index of Digital Trade Protection Strength and Intensity(DTPSI),which is reflecting the degree of digital trade protection,using it as the independent variable of the model.In order to calculate the dependent variable of the model,this paper uses GTAP 10 database to establish Levinson Petrin nonparametric estimation model to estimate the total factor productivity of data intensive and other industries in BRICs from 2004 to 2014.Finally,based on the panel data regression results,the impact of three different degrees of trade protection schemes on TFP of data intensive and other industries is simulated and analyzed.It is found that Digital Products Trade barriers in BRICs countries have significant negative impact on TFP of data intensive industries,such as post and telecommunications services,finance and insurance,and public services.However,the TFP of those industries which are not data-intensive in its nature has also been negatively affected.In addition,the negative effects brought by the low-level protection policies are inelastic,so they will not bring great downward pressure on TFP,while the middle-level and high-level digital trade protection policies are resilient to TFP,so they have greater negative impact.Thirdly,this paper uses GTAP 10 Computable General Equilibrium Model to plug in TFP estimation into the model,and further analyze the impact of digital trade barriers measures on major macroeconomic indicators.The simulation results show that with the improvement of the level of Digital Trade Barriers,the GDP of BRICs countries shows a downward trend in varying degrees,among which losses caused by a huge amount of data localization measures in China,Russia,and India are greater.From the perspective of the output scale in industries,the restrictions on the free flow of data caused by Digital Products Trade Barriers make the production scale of data intensive manufacturing industry and service industry shrink in all countries,while the relatively low data intensive industry output level is the least affected.From the perspective of the scale of import and export trade,as more than half of the digital trade barrier policies adopted by BRICs countries are limited by the domestic data cross-border export(transmission),the export trade of data intensive industries has declined while the import trade has increased.Finally,in order to overcome the serious negative impact of the Digital Products Trade Barriers on the total factor productivity,output value,import and export trade of BRICs data intensive industries,this paper attempts to put forward two creative cooperation frameworks and implementation schemes of operation mechanism.The first one is to comprehensively consider the development needs of developing countries' digital products trade,and take WTO as the main and TiSA agreement as the auxiliary body to realize GATS “+” Multilateral Digital Trade Cooperation Framework.The second is to strengthen the digital trade cooperation between BRICs countries,including the “Trinity” cooperation framework in the field of digital trade infrastructure construction,digital trade operation mechanism and soft environment cooperation.This research suggests that BRICs countries need to carry out multilateral digital trade cooperation with other countries as soon as possible,formulate effective regulatory measures,promote the development of Digital Trade and promote the realization of the goals of consumer security,data privacy and national security in the field of Internet. |
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