How Does Digital Economy Empower Real Economy - 2022-08-24
Digital transformation cannot be separated from the support of data elements. The 26th Meeting of the Central Committee for Deepening Overall Reform deliberated and adopted the Opinions on Building a Data Infrastructure System and Giving Better Play to the Role of Data Elements, which provide guidance for promoting the efficient and compliant circulation and use of data elements and empowering the development of the real economy. Recently, in an effort to strengthen overall planning and coordination and continuously enhance, optimize and expand China's digital economy, the State Council agreed to set up an Inter-ministerial Joint Meeting on Developing Digital Economy.
The potential of empowerment
Digital economy involves all aspects of Marx's social reproduction process: production - distribution - exchange - consumption. It is an important carrier to raise the level of productivity, improve the efficiency of distribution and exchange, expand total consumption, and achieve the smooth and efficient completion of social reproduction. Specifically, the digital economy has injected solid impetus into the high-quality growth of the real economy through promoting transformation and upgrading, expanding aggregate supply, and generating new demand.
As an integrated economy, the digital economy has a huge empowering effect. It can not only realize its own rapid development, but also contribute to the optimal allocation of resources within traditional agriculture, industry and service industry, as well as the structural upgrading and adjustment among industries, and realize industrial transformation and upgrading. For example, in the manufacturing domain, the new generation of information technology is now faster integrated with traditional manufacturing industry in an all-round way, constantly raising the networking, digital and intelligent level of the industry, enhancing the productivity of manufacturing enterprises, elevating the quality of products and services, improving the production process, boosting management efficiency, and promoting the sustainable development of new industries, new business formats and new business models.
The digital economy expands new supply through the construction of "new infrastructure", while generating new demand at the same time. Stimulating domestic demand is the key to forming a new development pattern in which domestic circulation serves as the mainstay and domestic and international circulations promote each other. The construction of new infrastructures such as 5G networks, big data centers, artificial intelligence, industrial Internet and IoT not only provide the market with new products and services, but also effectively promote the popularization and application of new consumption formats, new business models and new scenarios, thus catalyzing the reaching of a dynamic balance between new supply and new demand in the whole economic system at a higher level.
Challenges
Globally, the development of digital economy mainly faces the challenges of the digital divide, relatively lagging integration with the manufacturing industry, and inappropriate laws and regulations.
The digital divide is reflected in three dimensions. The first is the digital infrastructure divide. Globally, there are still 4 billion people who have no access to the Internet and cannot enjoy the dividends brought by the digital economy. The second dimension is the data quality divide. Due to low data quality and inconsistent data collection standards, the level of effective digital connectivity between regions, governments and enterprises has not been high. The third dimension is the digital capital divide. Similar to human capital, digital capital has the characteristics of being accumulable and investable. The level of digital capital stock can be defined from two dimensions: digital access capability, and digital processing capability. Clearly, in the era of digital economy, everybody is a data producer or a data consumer. But, the ability to acquire, output, integrate and exchange information varies from person to person.
Currently, China's digital economy is mainly concentrated in the field of consumption. It is a link between people themselves and between people, platforms and producers. It relies on the effect of network scale, platform removal and other means to reap benefits. Relatively speaking, all these are "low-hanging fruits". When the number of users reaches the ceiling and the basic service needs of consumers are met, the consumption-based digital economy will face low growth. On the other hand, the digital economy in the industrial sector requires connectivity between people and things and among things themselves.
There exists a so-called "productivity paradox" in the digital economy, that is, we are surrounded by digital information, but are also profoundly affected by it. Moreover, there is no way to include these effects in the statistics. For example, the spiritual service-oriented consumption and the sharing and spillover of digital information in the digital economy are not included in the national economic accounting system. Another example is that time is an important dimension for consideration in the digital economy. How to account the value and cost of time? When people use WeChat, watch short videos and give rewards, what they pay is the currency of "time". In the future, time may well become a circulating currency as depicted in the film In Time, the shock of which may be no less than the "thrilling leap" from commodity to currency as mentioned by Karl Marx in his On Capital.
As a factor of production, data participates in the distribution of factor incomes, but the property rights and use rights of data have yet to be clarified. Moreover, data monopoly is not conducive to industrial competition. In addition, there are differences in property rights protection between digital knowledge and general knowledge. How to achieve a balance between data sharing and protection and thus better build digital trust is also a big challenge.
Three starting points
For the digital economy to empower the high-quality development of the real economy, efforts are urgently needed in respect of practice, theory, and legislation.
Increasing investment in "digital capital", and narrowing the "digital divide". At the macroeconomic level, efforts should be made to intensify Internet investment, promote the construction of Digital China, and especially consolidate the dividend advantages brought by information technology for high-quality development through accelerating the commercial use of 5G, establishing big data models and applying artificial intelligence. It is necessary to pay attention to investment in common technological infrastructures, expand the scope of support for technological transformation, help sectors of the real economy to break through bottlenecks in the research, development and use of IoT technology, and realize the intelligent upgrading and transformation of traditional manufacturing industry. At the regional level, efforts should be made to strengthen the coordination of new infrastructure construction in various regions, narrow the gap in data access capacity between regions, and fully unleash their abilities to make spatial contributions to high-quality economic development. At the individual level, investment needs to be invested in individuals’ "digital capital" from the two dimensions of digital access and digital capability, so as to raise the level of digital capital stock in the whole society. For those digitally disadvantageous groups, it is imperative for the government, the public sector and community forces to provide necessary assistance to meet their basic needs of a digital life and build a digitally inclusive society.
Strengthening theoretical research on digital economy measurement and evaluation. It is necessary to explore a theoretical framework and measurement thinking that both are internationally comparable and can reflect Chinese characteristics and conform to China's reality. It is suggested that a cross-departmental and cross-level index research, survey and evaluation organization should be established to track and collect primary data and core data, systematically build a statistical survey framework for key indicators, and establish a GNP accounting system for data generation departments and data service departments as soon as possible. Under the premise of ensuring data quality and source controllability, efforts should be made to innovate data sources and add more flexible industrial data that can reflect market vitality and expand Internet-based big data channels that can capture data from networks.
Promoting digital infrastructure-related legislation to regulate the governance of digital economy. It is necessary to establish a data property rights system, promote the categorical and graded rights confirmation and authorized use of public data, enterprise data and personal data, set up separate ownership operation mechanisms for the right to hold data resources, the right to process and use data, and the right to operate data products, and improve the system of rights and interests protection for data elements. It is also necessary to establish a compliant and efficient circulation and trading system for data elements, improve the system of whole-process compliance and regulatory rules on data, and build a standardized data trading market. Besides, efforts should be made to improve the market access system, the fair competition review system and the fair competition regulatory system, realize the ex-ante, in-process and ex-post regulation over the entire chain and all domains, specify the pattern and objectives of multi-stakeholder governance, and establish and improve a new landscape of digital economic governance with the joint participation and effective collaboration of government departments, platforms, enterprises, industry organizations, and the public.
The author is Di Junpeng, an associate research professor at the Research Center for Big Data and Digital Economy of the Institute of Economics of Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.
Source: Wenhui Daily
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