Professor Wei Shangjin won the Sun Yefang Award for the latest economic monograph officially published

The Sun Yefang Prize for Economic Science is an award that recognizes and rewards collectives and individuals who have made outstanding contributions to economic science, which was established in 1985 and is selected and awarded every two years, which is the highest award in China's economic circles so far.

Recently, the winning works of the 19th (2020) Sun Yefang Economic Science Award were officially announced. Wei Shangjin, Visiting Professor of Oceanwide School of International Finance, Fudan University and Tenured Chair Professor of Columbia University, Wang Zhi, Senior Researcher of George Mason University and former Dean of the Institute of Global Industry Chains of the University of International Business and Economics, and Zhu Kunfu, Associate Professor of the School of Economics of Chinese Min University, co-authored the paper "Total Trade Accounting Method: Official Trade Statistics and The Measurement of Global Value Chains" (China Social Sciences, No. 9, 2015) won the 19th Sun Yefang Economic Science Award Paper Award.

This is the second time that Professor Wei Shangjin has won the Sun Yefang Economic Science Award. The paper argues that the revolution in global value chains has led to a rapid increase in intermediate trade in international trade, which has seriously misled the understanding of the world trade pattern by traditional trade aggregate statistics. This paper expands the framework for the decomposition of a country's total trade flows, which has had a wide impact on the study of the international industrial chain, previously proposed by Professor Wei Shangjin, Professor Wang Zhi, Dr. Kupman (Chief Economist of the WTO) and Professor Zhu Kunfu, to the research of a country's sector, multinational bilateral, and bilateral departments, and decomposes international trade flows at all levels into components such as value-added exports, returned domestic added value, foreign value-added value, and purely double-counting intermediate trade, and according to the source of value of trade goods, The difference between the final absorption site and the absorption channel is divided into 16 different paths, thus establishing a systematic corresponding framework between traditional international trade statistics and the system of national accounts.

In this paper, Professor Wei Shangjin and his co-authors proposed a new accounting system, the total trade accounting method, which revealed the methodological limitations of the indicators widely used in international trade research, such as trade balance, vertical specialization, value-added exports and explicit comparative advantages, and then revised these indicators, providing new tools for related research.

It is reported that Professor Wei Shangjin's latest economics monograph "Looking for the Optimal Solution to the Economy" was officially published recently. In this book, Professor Wei Shangjin takes the perspective of economics to gain insight into social problems and seek solutions to them, paying attention to the speed of economic development and the progress of globalization, without forgetting social equity and climate change. Professor Wei Shangjin pointed out that the most important way of thinking in economics is to recognize that the optimal solution is found under the constraint of limited total resources, and its objective function can cover social equity and long-term human survival.

Source: Fudan Oceanwide Institute of International Finance