Esports Industry, Video Game Industry and Economic Growth : An Empirical Research in China

The video game industry is one of the new engines of economic growth, and esports industry, as an essential subindustry, plays a pivotal role in driving economic growth. To investigate the mechanism and the quantitative relationship among them, we propose a two-stage transmission path “Esports Industry-Video Game Industry-Economic Growth”, with the video game industry as the intermediary. Vector autoregression-vector error correction (VAR-VEC) and cointegrating regression models are employed for analysis using empirical data from China. The empirical results show that for every 1% increase in the actual sales revenue of the esports industry (ASRE), the actual sales revenue of the video game industry (ASRG) increases by 0.52% and the gross domestic product (GDP) by 0.08%. Finally, policy proposals and suggestions are offered to encourage the development of the esports industry and the video game industry