Driving Consumption Upgrade Factors with Digital Economy | Economy | Digital Economy

China has a population of over 1.4 billion, with a middle-income group of over 400 million people, making it the world's most promising large market. The optimization and upgrading of resident consumption, combined with modern technology and production methods, contains enormous growth potential. Currently, a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation, with digitization, networking, and intelligence as the main directions, is continuously advancing. The digital economy, with its unique characteristics of high innovation, strong penetration, and wide coverage, is driving profound changes in production methods and lifestyles at an unprecedented speed and influence, and is increasingly becoming an important force in promoting consumption expansion and improvement. In the new era and new journey, we must follow the trend of digital economy development, actively promote the empowerment of consumption upgrading by the digital economy, and inject vitality into expanding domestic demand and promoting high-quality economic development.

Injecting new impetus into consumption upgrading

The digital economy promotes consumption upgrading by increasing the income level of residents. In theory, income is the prerequisite and foundation for consumption, and the improvement of residents' income level is an important driving force and basic condition for consumption upgrading. The digital economy can promote the improvement of residents' income levels from multiple aspects. Firstly, the widespread application of digital technology can comprehensively improve the level of social productivity and production and operation efficiency, increase the return on investment in human capital, and reduce production and operation costs. Secondly, the constantly emerging new formats and models of the digital economy have broken through the limitations of time and space, creating many new professions and job opportunities, and bringing more opportunities to increase residents' income. Once again, with the powerful resource integration and matching capabilities of digital technologies such as algorithms, digital employment service platforms can significantly improve the efficiency of supply and demand matching in the labor market, effectively reducing transaction costs for both supply and demand sides. Finally, the development of various vocational skills training platforms has greatly promoted the improvement of workers' skills and the accumulation of digital skills, enhanced their adaptability to rapidly changing new technologies, and thus brought about an increase in human capital, thereby promoting the continuous improvement of their income levels.

The digital economy promotes consumption upgrading by optimizing industrial structure. Production determines consumption. Production creates consumer goods, provides objects for consumer activities, and at the same time determines the way consumer activities are conducted, constantly stimulating new consumer demands. The development of digital economy can promote the optimization of industrial structure on the supply side, thereby promoting consumption upgrading. Firstly, as a new type of production factor, data elements are increasingly widely and deeply integrated into various fields of the economy and society. By accelerating industrial integration, reshaping the value chain of the industrial chain, and other means, the efficiency of factor allocation is greatly improved, and new business forms and models are constantly emerging to create new demands. Secondly, strong digital infrastructure has created favorable conditions for the rapid aggregation, flow, and efficient matching of various production factors, helping to improve the quality and efficiency of the supply system, and guiding the optimization and upgrading of industrial structure. Once again, digital technology promotes the high-end, intelligent, and green upgrading and transformation of traditional industries by reshaping internal processes, transforming traditional industrial production methods, optimizing industrial organizational structures, and promoting the construction of a modern industrial system.

The digital economy drives consumption upgrading by better adapting to and meeting new demands. As the most important endogenous driving force for economic development, consumption reflects the people's yearning and pursuit for a better life. With the changes in China's development stage and the continuous improvement of residents' income levels, their consumption needs are gradually shifting towards service-oriented consumption, with a greater emphasis on meeting spiritual needs such as non-material experiences, enjoyment, and emotions. In addition, the consumption habits and ways of the new generation of groups growing up in the environment of more affluent material life and the rapid popularization of the Internet are increasingly showing new characteristics such as digitalization, personalization and socialization. The digital economy has unique advantages in adapting to these new trends and meeting new demands. On the one hand, the application of digital technology helps to more accurately capture consumer demand and its changing trends, promote production mode changes through on-demand customization and sales based production, innovate supply chains, reshape value chains, and create more new products and services. On the other hand, the digital economy can create rich consumer application scenarios, and technological innovation applications can provide people with a smarter, more efficient, and safer consumption environment and experience, thereby better meeting the diverse and multi-level consumption needs of survival, development, and enjoyment.

Focus on key areas of focus

Promoting consumption upgrading through the digital economy is of great significance for better safeguarding people's livelihoods, cultivating a complete domestic demand system, and building a new development pattern. Therefore, it is necessary to implement comprehensive policies and fully leverage the potential driving force of the digital economy to promote consumption upgrading.

Promote the digital transformation of industries. Guide and encourage enterprises to use digital technology to develop flexible manufacturing and intelligent production, comprehensively enhance their ability to quickly respond to market demand and flexibly convert production capacity, and promote the formation of a virtuous cycle of mutual promotion and interaction between supply and demand, production and consumption. Encourage large platform enterprises to strengthen technical support and skill training for digital operations of small and medium-sized merchants, and accelerate the digital transformation and upgrading of traditional offline formats. Increase support for the digital transformation of small and medium-sized enterprises in the consumer goods manufacturing and consumer services industries, and lead new demand with high-quality supply creation.

Fully unleash the value of data elements. On the premise of strengthening data security, we will increase efforts to open, share, and integrate data resources for development. Exploring the establishment of data element circulation rules based on the characteristics of different data subjects such as public data, enterprise data, and consumer personal data, and breaking down data barriers within and between different subjects such as government, public institutions, and enterprises. Encourage platform enterprises to innovate their products and services through in-depth exploration of data elements and rational application of algorithm technologies, providing computing power resource support for enterprises.

Accelerate the improvement of new infrastructure. Focusing on meeting the demand of consumption upgrading, we will moderately advance the layout and construction of 5G network, industrial Internet, Internet of Things, data center and other new infrastructure. Adhere to the combination of market leadership and government guidance, innovate investment and financing models, encourage and guide social forces to participate in infrastructure construction in areas such as culture, education, tourism, health, and elderly care. Comprehensively promote the digital and intelligent transformation of traditional commercial, transportation, municipal and other infrastructure, accelerate the construction and resource sharing of intelligent terminal facilities such as express delivery service stations and unmanned vending machines, in order to better adapt to new forms and models of digital consumption.

Continuously optimizing the digital consumption environment. Adhere to the development laws of the digital economy and digital consumption, timely formulate and improve relevant laws, regulations, and policy provisions, and promote the innovative development of the platform economy in a standardized manner. Accelerate the construction of consumer credit system and establish a long-term regulatory mechanism based on credit. Actively utilizing technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and blockchain to strengthen digital regulatory capabilities, improving cross departmental comprehensive supervision and integrated online and offline regulatory mechanisms, increasing crackdowns on various illegal and irregular behaviors in online transactions, and striving to create a safe and worry free consumption environment.