About Institute of Quantitative and Technical Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

Institute of Quantitative and Technical Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

The Institute of Quantitative and Technical Economics is a constituent research institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing, working in CASS's Academic Division of Economics. It is listed in CASS's official Organisations directory as the Institute of Quantitative & Technological Economics, and shortened in its own scholars' publications to IQTE. Its specialism is method: it applies econometrics, mathematical modelling, forecasting and the economics of technology to the study of the Chinese economy. Where its sister institutes in the economics division are defined by their subjects — industry for the Institute of Industrial Economics, the countryside for the Rural Development Institute, money and finance for the Institute of Finance and Banking — this institute is defined by its tools, and it lends those tools to subjects across the whole economy: macroeconomic analysis, energy and climate policy, innovation, industrial forecasting and, increasingly, the digital economy. Its directory description states that it supports national economic decision-making with quantitative models, and its journal, the Journal of Quantitative and Technical Economics, is the leading Chinese journal of its field.

Origins after 1981

CASS's official history places the institute in the academy's second wave of creation. The history records that CASS was founded in May 1977 from 14 research units of the former Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; that from 1977 to 1981 a host of new institutes were established, including the Institutes of Industrial Economics, Rural Development and Finance and Trade Economics; and that since 1981 some more institutes have been established, including the Institute of Quantitative and Technical Economics, together with the Center for Documentation and Information, the Research Center for Chinese Borderland History and Geography, the Institute of Political Sciences, the Institute of Taiwan Studies and the Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies.

Independent evidence dates the institute's existence to the very beginning of that post-1981 period: the economist Chenggang Xu, later a professor at the London School of Economics and at Hong Kong universities, was a research associate at the Institute of Quantitative and Technical Economics of CASS from 1982 to 1984, and published on technological change in a centralised economy in the institute's field in 1984. The institute was therefore operating by 1982, at the moment when China's reform leadership was beginning to demand exactly what the institute supplies — numerical analysis of an economy in transition, forecasts of the effects of policy changes, and systematic study of how technology changes economic performance. Its Chinese name, rendered in full as the Institute of Quantitative Economics and Technical Economics, preserves both halves of that founding mission: quan­titative economics, the measurement and modelling of the economy, and technical economics, the economic appraisal of technology and technical change.

Quantitative economics: econometrics, modelling and forecasting

The first half of the institute's mission is quantitative economics proper: econometric methods, mathematical models of the macroeconomy, and forecasting. This is the work described in its directory remit as applying econometrics, mathematical modelling and forecasting to macroeconomic analysis. In practical terms, it means building models that represent the structure of the Chinese economy — the relationships between investment, consumption, prices, money, trade and output — estimating those relationships from data, and using the models to project where the economy is heading and what would happen under alternative policies. Such models are the standard equipment of national economic decision-making, because a finance ministry or planning body cannot test a policy on the real economy first; it tests the policy in a model, and institutes like this one build and maintain the models.

The institute's scholars work at the research frontier of that craft as well as its application. Its fellows hold roles in the Chinese Association of Quantitative Economics, the field's national association, whose annual conferences divide their discussion groups among the theories and methods of quantitative economics, the operation of the macroeconomy, currency and banking, capital markets and insurance, public finance and taxation, investment and trade, regional and industrial economy, and the evaluation of competitiveness — a programme that maps closely onto the range of subjects to which quantitative methods are applied. The association's secretariat notices direct readers both to the website of the Journal of Quantitative and Technical Economics and to the institute's own website, iqte.cass.cn, reflecting the institute's central place in the discipline's national organisation.

Technical economics: technology, innovation and industrial forecasting

The second half of the mission is technical economics — the study of the economics of technology itself. This includes appraising technical choices and investment projects, analysing how innovation spreads through industries, and forecasting the development of industries as their technologies change. Chenggang Xu's early paper at the institute, "On Technological Change in a Centralized Economy", published in 1984 in Studies of Quantitative and Technical Economics, shows the field engaging, at the very start of reform, with the question of how a planned economy generates — or fails to generate — technical progress. That question did not disappear with planning; it changed form. In a market economy the corresponding questions concern innovation systems, the adoption of new technologies by firms, and the forecasting of industrial change, all of which remain in the institute's recorded remit under innovation and industrial forecasting.

Technical economics also explains the institute's natural involvement in energy and technology policy. Appraising an energy technology, a new industrial process or a digital platform requires the same combination the institute embodies: engineering-aware economic appraisal on one side, and quantitative estimation and forecasting on the other.

Energy, climate and the economics of data

Energy and climate policy form a documented strand of the institute's work, named in its directory remit. Its research fellow Cai Yuezhou — director of the institute's Digital Economy Research Office, discussed below — has also published internationally on the relationship between international trade and the feasibility of global climate change agreements, work listed by the Centre for Economic Policy Research, connecting China's trade position to the global governance of climate change. The combination is characteristic: climate policy is, among other things, a quantitative problem — of emissions trajectories, energy demand forecasts, carbon costs and trade effects — and an institute built for modelling is built for it.

The institute's quantitative reach extends to measuring new phenomena. Cai Yuezhou's study of data flow and transaction modes, published in China Economist, set out to deliver a complete picture of the flow and transaction of personal, corporate and public data, estimating the volume of data generation and storage and the volume and trend of data market transactions for major economies. It found that data classification is diverse, that transaction and profit distribution are complex, that the global data market was in a nascent stage of rapid development with a transaction volume of about 100 billion US dollars, and that China's data market was even less developed, accounting for only about 10 percent of the world total, with a striking disequilibrium between data generation scale and storage scale in China. Estimating the size of a market that barely existed a decade earlier is quantitative economics in its purest applied form, and the study was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China projects, including a major project on macroeconomic big data modelling and prediction — a grant that itself bridges the institute's classical modelling mission and its newer data work.

The digital economy research programme

The digital economy has become one of the institute's most visible programmes, centred on its Digital Economy Research Office (also rendered Digital Economy Research Department), directed by Cai Yuezhou. Cai's book The Digital Economy and China's Economic Development: Theoretical Mechanism and Empirical Analysis was one of three major outcomes on artificial intelligence and the digital economy unveiled by CASS at a press conference on 3 April 2023. As CASS's own reporting summarised it, the book clarifies the connotation of digital technology and the digital economy from three perspectives — digital industrialisation; industrial digitalisation; and new technology, new factor and new infrastructure — and reviews the theoretical mechanism through which digital technology and the digital economy affect high-quality economic development. The three-part framework has become a standard way of organising Chinese digital-economy analysis: the production of digital goods and services themselves; the digital transformation of traditional industries; and the underlying technologies, data factors and infrastructure that support both.

Cai has carried the same framework into the field's reference literature, telling a 2024 seminar on the Handbook of Chinese Economics digital economy volume, in his capacity as director of the institute's digital economy research office, that the era of the industrial internet is pushing industrial digitalisation towards a path supported by a super-large-scale market, effective market operations and active government work, and stressing the need to include typical facts reflecting Chinese characteristics. The institute's digital work also connects back to its sister institutes' subjects: digitalisation of industry is studied at the Institute of Industrial Economics from the industry side, and at this institute from the side of measurement, mechanism and modelling — a division of labour that only makes sense inside a single academy where the two institutes sit in the same division.

The Journal of Quantitative and Technical Economics

The institute publishes the Journal of Quantitative and Technical Economics (Shuliang Jingji Jishu Jingji Yanjiu), the field's flagship Chinese journal, with its own journal website at jqte.net. The journal publishes research on quantitative economic theory and method and on technical economics, and its pages carry work by scholars across China's universities and institutes: a City University of Hong Kong professor's publication list, for example, records an article on monetary policy autonomy in China published in the journal in 2015 under the imprint "Beijing: Institute of Quantitative and Technical Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences". The journal's editorial leadership is drawn from the institute: Li Haijian, whose published biography records a career at the Institute of Industrial Economics from 1987 to 2020 and senior editorial roles at the journal China Industrial Economics, became party secretary and deputy director of the Institute of Quantitative and Technological Economics in January 2020 and deputy editor-in-chief of the Journal of Quantitative and Technical Economics from March 2020. That a senior figure moved between two CASS economics institutes and two of their journals illustrates the close integration of the academy's economics division, while the journal itself gives this institute its principal channel into the national scholarly conversation in its field.

People and scholarly connections

The institute's people document its range. Chenggang Xu's early-1980s research associateship connects the institute to the generation of Chinese economists who carried quantitative and institutional analysis into international scholarship. Cai Yuezhou, research fellow and director of the Digital Economy Research Office, represents its current applied frontier in data and digital-economy measurement, with work supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and recognised in international research networks. Li Haijian's arrival in 2020 as party secretary and deputy director brought experience of both industrial economics and journal editorship. Contact points for the institute's work in its field's national association have included fellows reachable at cass.org.cn addresses through the institute, whose own website is iqte.cass.cn. Readers should treat individual roles as belonging to the dates of the sources that record them; what they establish collectively is an institute staffed across the full span of its discipline, from econometric theory to national digital-economy strategy.

Support for national economic decision-making

The institute's directory description ends with its purpose: it supports national economic decision-making with quantitative models. That phrase distinguishes the institute from a purely academic department. Its forecasts, model simulations and technology appraisals are produced for use — by planners weighing the effects of a policy before adopting it, by analysts tracking whether the economy is following its projected path, and by strategists assessing long-run questions such as energy transition and digital transformation. CASS as a whole is a national think tank as well as a research academy, and within the economics division this institute is the one whose think-tank output takes the form of numbers: projections, scenarios and measured estimates, including estimates of things, like the data market, that official statistics did not yet routinely measure.

Identity and distinctions

The Institute of Quantitative and Technical Economics is the CASS institute for economic measurement and method: established after 1981 and operating by 1982, listed in the Academic Division of Economics in CASS's Organisations directory, publisher of the Journal of Quantitative and Technical Economics, home to a digital economy research office whose director's work was showcased among CASS's major outcomes of 2023, and supplier of econometric modelling, forecasting, energy and climate analysis and technical-economic appraisal in support of national decision-making. It should be distinguished from its parent, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, profiled separately; from quantitative economics institutes and departments at Chinese universities, such as Huaqiao University's Institute of Quantitative Economics, which share the discipline but are not the CASS institute; and from its sister CASS institutes, whose subjects it serves with methods rather than duplicating. Its name appears in sources in both "Technical" and "Technological" renderings — the directory uses Institute of Quantitative & Technological Economics — but both refer to the same Beijing institute described here.