Recent days, a research paper titled “The Rise of Robots in China” co-authored by Hong Cheng and his team was published in the internationally-renowned Journal of Economic Perspectives (JEP, Issue 2, 2019). Both its first author and correspondence author are IQDS researchers. This is another paper of great academic significance published in JEP since the last one released in 2017. JEP now ranks the 5th among Global Top 353 journals in economics with the impact factor of 5.607.
The paper pointed out that as the world’s largest consumer of industrial robots, China took up 30% sales of the global industrial robots market. Based on the firm-level CEES data collected from two rounds of survey during 2016-2018, compared with the data from the International Federation of Robotics, the paper described how robots were adopted in China’s manufacturing industry. It also provided an in-depth analysis on the underlying reasons behind the rapidly growing application of robots in China based on supply and demand aspects from the perspectives of government, employers and employees.
The study indicates, with the growth of working-age population and the increase of their wages, industrial robots are being widely adopted because of the impact incurred by the increasing labor cost in China. China is the leading force in global manufacturing and consumption of automobiles and electronic devices, the two pillar industries with the most demand and adoption of industrial robots. Meanwhile, the rising labor cost and the shortage of labor force as well as the related policies taken by Chinese government also throw impacts on the manufacturing and utilization of industrial robots in China. All the joint factors contribute to the transformation and upgrading of domestic enterprises to achieve high-quality growth and development. It also demonstrates that China will possibly play an important role in robotics market.
In addition, the year of 2019 is a fruitful and prosperous year for IQDS with numerous quality research papers published and to be published. The paper titled “the performance of China’s state-owned enterprise” written by the IQDS research team led by Tang Li, was accepted by the Global Top 3 journal in economics, Economic development and Cultural Change (EDCC).