An Empirical Study on the Contribution of Information Technology
to Liaoning Economy based on Econometric Model: Taking the
Internet Industry as an Example
Sen Li
1, 2 a
, Hongyuan Liang
1
, Zinan Li
1
and Haiying He
1
1
Management School, Shenyang Jianzhu University, Shenyang, China
2
Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences,Shenyang, China
Keywords: Information Technology, Internet Industry, Liaoning Economy, Econometric Model.
Abstract: Information technology is regarded as the fourth industrial revolution. Information technologies such as big
data, Internet and artificial intelligence have become important driving forces to promote economic
development. Taking Liaoning Province as the research object, this paper uses a variety of econometric
analysis methods to study its development level of Internet industry and its contribution to the economy. This
paper constructs the evaluation index system of Internet industry, and uses entropy method to make a
quantitative analysis. Multiple regression analysis was used to study the impact of Internet technology on
economy. The research shows that the level of information technology such as Internet in Liaoning Province
is increasing year by year, and has significantly promoted the economic development of Liaoning Province.
On this basis, this paper puts forward countermeasures and suggestions to speed up the development of
information technology industry in Liaoning Province: we should take information technology as a key
development industry, cultivate and introduce relevant enterprises, and speed up the training of information
technology talents.
1 INTRODUCTION
In 2019, Liaoning Province achieved the GDP of
2490.95 billion yuan, an increase of 5.5% over the
previous year, ranking 15th among all provinces and
cities in China. Since 2000, the overall economic and
industrial development of Liaoning Province has
encountered great difficulties. The economic growth
has been slowing down, especially in 2016. So far,
the total GDP of Liaoning Province has not recovered
to the level of 2015. Liaoning is an old industrial base
in China, the proportion of traditional industries is
high, the development of emerging industries is
relatively late, and the problem of unreasonable
industrial structure is serious. As an emerging
industry, Internet has the prominent advantages of
high industrial relevance and strong driving ability. In
recent years, the rapid economic development of
China's southeast coastal provinces has also proved
the important role of the Internet economy in the
national economy. Compared with southern
a
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4391-2582
provinces in China, Liaoning Province's Internet
economy started relatively late. There is a big gap
between Liaoning Province and the other provinces
in terms of industrial output scale and the number of
industry leading enterprises. This gap is also one of
the important reasons for the imbalance of industrial
structure and the continuous decline of economic
ranking in Liaoning Province.
Nordhaus (Nordhaus, 2021) believes that long-term
economic growth faces many difficulties, such as
environmental constraints and unreasonable economic
structure, and information technology is an effective way to
solve these problems and an important driving force to
promote regional economic development. Especially since
the outbreak of COVID-19, the global economy is facing
greater difficulties. The economy and trade between
countries have been greatly restricted, and many countries
and regions have experienced negative economic growth.
Sharma
et al . (Sharma, et al, 2021) reviewed the relevant
and published literature that has been obtained, it is found
that after the covid-19 pandemic, the use of digitization,
information and technology, the Internet of things and other
related technologies is being emphasized, and the mode of
Li, S., Liang, H., Li, Z. and He, H.
An Empirical Study on the Contribution of Information Technology to Liaoning Economy based on Econometric Model: Taking the Internet Industry as an Example.
DOI: 10.5220/0011164400003440
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Big Data Economy and Digital Management (BDEDM 2022), pages 131-136
ISBN: 978-989-758-593-7
Copyright
c
 2022 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
131

economic growth shows a great change from traditional
methods to modern methods.
Therefore, it is necessary
to study the role of Internet industry in Liaoning
economy from the perspective of Internet industry,
and put forward how to realize the transformation and
upgrading of Liaoning economy through the
development of Internet economy.
As an emerging thing, the research on the impact
of the Internet on the economy and industry is still in
its infancy, but in the limited research, we have
basically reached a consensus that the development of
the Internet industry has a positive role in promoting
the economy. For example, Yincheng Xie et al. (Xie,
et al, 2015) took the tertiary industry as an example to
study the impact of the Internet industry on economic
development. The study found that the Internet has a
positive impact on the added value of many sectors in
the tertiary industry, and proposed that the
development of the Internet industry should be
accelerated. Qiping Jiang (Jiang, 2015) proposed that
the Internet would greatly promote China's economy,
and analyzed the positive impact of Internet plus on
the three industries from the perspective of
agriculture, manufacturing and service industries.
Debao Dai et al. (Dai, et al, 2016) put forward the
Internet business model to accelerate China's
economic transformation and development, and
Internet technology supports the transformation of
Internet business model. From the above literature, we
can see that most of the studies from the perspective
of national macro-economy have studied the role of
the Internet industry in promoting the economy. These
studies have laid a solid foundation for this study, but
from the provincial level, especially in Liaoning
Province as the research object is still relatively rare.
2 MODEL BUILDING
2.1 Internet Development Index Model
Measuring the development level of the Internet
requires comparative analysis from multiple
dimensions, of which the Internet infrastructure
construction and Internet application are the two most
important aspects. Combined with the research
results of other scholars at home and abroad, this
paper constructs the Internet development index
model of the two provinces from these Liaoning
aspects, as shown in the table below.
Table 1: Index System of Internet development in Liaoning
Province.
First level index Second level index
Internet infrastructure
Realm name
Internet broadband access
port
Length of optical cable line
Internet applications
Number of websites
Number of web pages
Internet broadband access
users
Internet penetration rate
In the index system of Internet development of
Liaoning Province, the first level index Internet
infrastructure includes three second level indexes,
namely domain name, Internet broadband access port
and optical cable line length km. The first level
indicator Internet application includes four second
level indicators, which are the number of websites,
the number of web pages, Internet broadband access
users and Internet penetration rate.
How to effectively evaluate the development level
of the Internet has always been a hot topic in academic
circles. The methods used include factor analysis,
expert scoring and so on. Although these methods can
solve the problem of multi index evaluation to a
certain extent, they are too subjective in determining
the weight, and the evaluation results are difficult to
convince everyone. In order to overcome this
problem, this paper uses entropy method to evaluate
the Internet development level of Liaoning Province,
which can eliminate the impact of subjective scoring
on the evaluation results. Entropy method is a
mathematical method used to judge the degree of
dispersion of an index. The greater the degree of
dispersion, the greater the impact of the index on the
comprehensive evaluation. The calculation formula is
as follows:
ij
m
i
ijj
y
m
e ln
ln
1
1

=
−=
(i=1..n; j=1..
m
)
(1)
jj
ed −=1
(2)
Among them, e
j
is the entropy of the j-th index, M
is the number of samples, y
ij
is the proportion of the
i-th year under the j-th index, and d
j
is the redundancy
of entropy. After obtaining the entropy and
redundancy of the index, the weight of the index can
be further determined.

=
=
m
j
j
j
j
d
d
w
1
(3)
BDEDM 2022 - The International Conference on Big Data Economy and Digital Management
132

After determining the weight of the indicator, the
final comprehensive score can be obtained by
combining the specific data of the indicator. The
calculation formula is as follows:
ij
m
j
ji
pw ⋅=

=1
s
(4)
Among them, s
j
is the comprehensive score, w
j
is
the weight of the index, pij is the actual value of the
index.
2.2 Multiple Regression Model
After obtaining the Internet development index of
Liaoning Province, this paper further analyzes the
impact of Internet industry development on the
economy of Liaoning Province. In the traditional
theory of economics, capital investment and human
investment are important forces to promote economic
growth and industrial development. In addition,
scientific and technological progress is another
important factor. In this paper, we take the
development level of the Internet as an indicator to
reflect the progress of science and technology.
Therefore, we build a model of influencing factors of
economic and industrial development in Liaoning
Province.
ε
β
β
β
α
++++=
332211
xxxy
(5)
Among them, x1 is capital input, x2 is human
input, x3 is Internet development index, and Y is
GDP of Liaoning Province. Collect the relevant data
of Liaoning Province from 2011 to 2019, and
combine with the Internet development index of
Liaoning Province obtained from the previous
analysis to conduct multiple regression analysis of
time series, using Eviews software.
3 DATA COLLECTION AND
ARRANGEMENT
The data analysis of this paper is divided into two
parts. The first part is to build the Internet
development index model of Liaoning Province,
collect and sort out the data required by the indicators
in the model, and calculate the development and
change of Internet Index in Liaoning Province during
the research period. The second part is the analysis of
the influencing factors of the economic development
of Liaoning Province, which creatively takes the
Internet Index as an important influencing factor to
find out its relationship with the economy of Liaoning
Province and the influence intensity. All the data are
from China Statistical Yearbook and Liaoning
statistical yearbook. The research period is from
2011 to 2019.
4 EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF
INTERNET DEVELOPMENT
LEVEL
4.1 Descriptive Statistics
Before empirical analysis, descriptive statistical
analysis of each index data is carried out. As can be
seen from the table, the overall indicators of Internet
industry in Liaoning Province are increasing year by
year.
Table 2: Basic data of Internet industry in Liaoning
Province.
2011 2012 20132014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019
Realm name
0.14 0.23 0.22 0.30 0.48 0.59 0.48 0.65 0.96
Internet
broadband
access port
9.81 12.7 16.3 20.8 27.1 32.4 31.2 32.4 32.7
Length of
optical cable
line
4010 4422 52286346 7707 10353 11744 1354714998
Number of
websites
4.8 6.4 8.6 9.7 11.1 11.8 12.3 11.4 12.2
Number of
web pages
972 1822 2282 2409 1841 1711 2100 1772 2199
Internet
broadband
access users
6.5 7.1 7.3 7.7 8.6 9.7 10.6 11.4 12.3
Internet
penetration
rate (%)
47.7 50.1 55.9 58.8 62.3 62.6 64.2 66.5 71.8
Note: million
It can be seen from table 2 that from 2011 to 2019,
the data of various indicators of Internet industry in
Liaoning Province have increased significantly,
especially the growth rate of realm name and internet
broadband access port has exceeded 300%, and the
growth rate of length of optical cable line and number
of websites has also exceeded 100%. At the same
time, the Internet penetration rate has also increased
from less than 50% to 71.8%, exceeding the national
average. It can be seen that the development quality
of Internet industry in Liaoning Province has
improved significantly.
An Empirical Study on the Contribution of Information Technology to Liaoning Economy based on Econometric Model: Taking the Internet
Industry as an Example
133

4.2 Internet Index Analysis
Based on the index system constructed above, the
entropy method is used to calculate the Internet
industry development index of Liaoning Province.
Figure 1: Internet development index of Liaoning Province.
As can be seen from Figure 1, the Internet
development index of Liaoning Province has an
obvious upward trend, reaching 0.2324 in 2019,
which has almost doubled in five years.
5 RESEARCH ON INTERNET
CONTRIBUTION
Before multiple regression analysis of time series
data, it is necessary to test the stationarity of each
index data. The method used in this paper is unit root
test. First, after the data is standardized, the unit root
test is performed on the data.
Table 3: Results of the first unit root test.
GDP Inves
t
Labo
r
Internet
ADF-test -2.1442 -1.4409 -1.9112 0.4968
Prob 0.2358 0.5017 0.3099 0.9724
Conclusion NO NO NO NO
It can be seen from the table that these variables
have not passed the unit root test, so there is no way
to do further cointegration analysis. According to the
usual practice, these variables need to be
logarithmically processed, and then the second unit
root test is carried out. The test results are as follows:
Table 4: Results of the second unit root test.
GDP Inves
t
Labo
r
Internet
ADF-test -2.2843 -2.389 -12.119 -43.4941
Prob 0.0297 0.0269 0.0003 0.0001
Conclusion YES YES YES YES
It can be seen from table 4 that all variables have
passed the unit root test, shows that these variables
are of the same order, so regression analysis can be
carried out. The results of regression analysis are as
follows:
Table 5: Regression analysis results.
Model 1 Model 2
C -2.3729
*
(1.0637)
-3.1212
**
(2.0206)
β
1
2.2137
*
(1.0777)
5.9395
**
(2.0010)
β
2
-1.0042
(0.3614)
β
3
1.3522
(0.2342)
4.5338
***
(4.0040)
Ad
j
usted R
2
0.2010 0.8072
F 1.6708 17.7481
Note: the standard deviation in brackets, ***, **, * indicate
the significance level of 1%, 5%, and 10% respectively.
From table 5, we can see that when model 1 is
adopted, both human investment and Internet
development index fail to pass the test. At the same
time, the value of goodness of fit is 0.201, indicating
that the interpretation ability of the model is weak.
According to the economic development experience
of European and American countries, the contribution
of labor force to the economy is becoming weaker
and weaker, while the role of capital and information
technology is becoming more and more prominent
year by year. Therefore, in the second regression
analysis, we remove the variable labor input, so we
get model 2. In model 2, all variables pass the test, the
coefficient of capital investment is 5.9395, and the
coefficient of Internet development index is 4.5338.
The coefficients of the two variables are positive,
indicating that capital investment and Internet
development index have a positive impact on the
economic development of Liaoning Province.
Therefore, we should speed up the development of
the Internet industry, so as to drive the high-quality
economic development of Liaoning Province, as well
as the transformation and upgrading of the industry.
6 CONCLUSIONS AND
RECOMMENDATIONS
This paper constructs the evaluation index system of
Internet industry development level, calculates it by
entropy method, and obtains the Internet
development index of Liaoning Province from 2011
BDEDM 2022 - The International Conference on Big Data Economy and Digital Management
134

to 2019. On this basis, taking it as an important
influencing factor, we use the regression analysis
model to analyze its contribution to the economy of
Liaoning Province.
(1) The index data of Internet industry in Liaoning
Province show an upward trend, and its
comprehensive evaluation index also shows the same
trend.
(2) The Internet industry has a positive impact on
the economic development of Liaoning Province. The
high-quality development of the Internet industry can
promote the transformation and upgrading of
Liaoning economy.
Therefore, in order to accelerate the development
of Internet industry in Liaoning Province, the
following countermeasures and suggestions are put
forward.
(1) The government should formulate the
Internet development plan. The development of
Internet industry is inseparable from the scientific
guidance and support of government departments.
Internet is different from the traditional industry, is a
technology and innovation intensive industry,
compared with southern China, Liaoning enterprises'
innovation consciousness has a certain gap.
Therefore, the government should strengthen the top-
level design, formulate the Internet industry
development plan, set up the Internet industry
guidance fund, formulate the white list of industrial
development, give priority to the development of the
Internet industry, and accelerate and drive the
transformation and upgrading of traditional
industries.
(2) We should cultivate and introduce Internet
leading enterprises. From the development
experience of Internet industry in southern provinces
of China, leading enterprises are the key factors to
achieve high-quality development of Internet
industry. Such as Alibaba and pinduoduo in Zhejiang
Province. Tencent and other enterprises in
Guangdong Province, through their strong influence,
help enterprises form a complete Internet industry
ecological chain, which not only directly contributes
considerable economic benefits to the local economy,
but also drives the high-quality development of other
local industries. Therefore, Liaoning Province should
speed up the introduction and training of Internet
leading enterprises, formulate fiscal and tax
preferential policies, and give full support to some
Internet Unicorn enterprises.
We should speed up the training of Internet
talents. Talent is the core competitiveness of
industrial development. The Internet industry is
different from the traditional industry, which has high
requirements for the professional knowledge of
talents. In order to speed up the development of the
Internet industry, we should start from the
perspective of personnel training, and quickly form a
group of influential talents in the industry. We should
give full play to the advantages of Liaoning Province,
set up Internet industry related majors in Dalian
University of technology, Northeast University and
other universities, and carry out extensive training
activities within Internet enterprises. Implement the
work of Internet talent identification, and provide
high-quality services in the fields of personal medical
care and children's education. Attract Internet talents
from other regions to work in Liaoning Province.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was financially supported by 1. Liaoning
Federation of Social Sciences—Study on the
coupling of coordinated development of real estate
and urban economy in Liaoning
Province(NO.2022lslwtkt-049) 2.Department of
Education of Liaoning Province—Research on
coupling development of strategic emerging
industries and traditional industries in Liaoning
Province (NO.lnqn202031).
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