Abstract

China has quickly become the largest e-commerce market in the world. By matching a nationally representative China Family Panel Studies survey with county-level e-commerce information obtained from Alibaba, this paper examines how e-commerce development has shaped household consumption growth in China. The paper presents three major findings. First, e-commerce development is associated with higher consumption growth. Second, the relationship is stronger for the rural sample, inland regions, and poor households, suggesting that e-commerce development helps reduce spatial inequality in consumption. Third, the consumption of durable goods and in-style goods has grown faster than the consumption of local services.

Speaker

Dr. Xubei Luo is a Senior Economist at the World Bank Group. Dr. Luo has 15 years of experience working at the World Bank Group. She has worked in the operation, research, and evaluation departments, and conducted country work in the East Asia and Europe and Central Asia Regions. She led the enterprise aspect of the World Development Report 2014, Risk and Opportunity. She recently task managed the joint research in e-commerce between the World Bank and the Alibaba Group, China. She published over 50 articles on poverty and inequality, growth, labor market, spatial economy, global value chains, business environment, and trade facilitation issues. She coauthored a book of Multilateral Banks and the Development Process: Vital Links in the Results Chain (published by Transaction Publishers, 2012). She is ranked the top 10% of authors by all-time downloads on SSRN. Dr. Luo holds a Ph.D. in Economics from International Development Research Center (CERDI), University of Auvergne, France, and three MAs in Project Analysis, Development Economics, and Economic Policy from CERDI, and an MA in Finance from Sun Yat-Sen University, China.