Is the development of informatization and digitalization deviating too quickly from the real economy? The key is to look at this

When it comes to the digital economy, special attention should be paid to the concept of the digital real economy. In recent years, we have emphasized the development of the real economy, which is raised in response to the so-called virtual economy. The problem of the virtual economy is first of all excessive financialization, such as over-hype of real estate as an investment product, and excessive self-circulation of financial activities.

There is also the rapid development of informatization and digitization, which some people believe is a virtual activity that deviates from the real economy. There are also some views that the development of e-commerce platforms has squeezed out a large number of shops, resulting in an impact on the real economy. Does that lead to the conclusion that finance and the digital economy should not be developed? Apparently not. Because finance is the core of the modern economy, and the development of the digital economy is the trend of the times, these are social consensuses with sufficient theoretical basis. The real problem is how finance serves the real economy, and how digital technologies can be effectively integrated with the traditional real economy.

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The criterion for the effective integration of financial and digital technologies with the real economy is whether it is conducive to increasing productivity. For example, excessive financialization does not increase productivity, it is not creating wealth, but redistributing social wealth. Some unfair competition behaviors in Internet platforms have similar characteristics. From the perspective of productivity standards, it is necessary to pay attention to the rapid development of the digital real economy in some industries, such as production and circulation. The deep integration of the digital economy and the real economy in these industries has the characteristics of digital technology directly involving in the real economic process, heavy assets, large number of employees, and optimized supply chain layout, which significantly improves productivity and forms a relatively strong competitive advantage.

Emphasizing the development of the real economy is not simply a return to the traditional real economy, nor is it just an emphasis on the development of material forms of production. In fact, the traditional real economy has a large surplus, and increasing supply may not necessarily have market demand and competitiveness. Therefore, we are facing two different real economies, one is the real economy that has declined in traditional competitiveness and has a serious surplus; the other is a new real economy that is digitally empowered and productivity has increased significantly. A real challenge we face is to achieve transformation and how to transform the traditional real economy into a new real economy that will increase productivity after digital empowerment.

There are two views on the relationship between manufacturing and services. One emphasizes that manufacturing is very important and is the foundation of the country, and the proportion must be maintained above a certain standard. Another believes that the increase in the proportion of the service industry is in line with the law of economic structural transformation, and China has reached the stage of service industry-oriented development. Both of these claims sound reasonable, but they are inevitably constrained. If you look at the inside from the surface, it is not difficult to find that the two are not opposites, but support each other. The service industry, especially the productive service industry that directly provides services to the manufacturing industry, including research and development, design, logistics, finance, information services, human resources services, legal and business services, etc., was initially included in a large number of manufacturing industries. With the development of these businesses and the improvement of the level of specialized division of labor, outsourcing services and other formats have been adopted and classified into the service industry territory. These productive services and manufacturing are integrated and highly interdependent. A local productive service industry is developed, which usually corresponds to a high-level manufacturing industry. On the contrary, if the productive service industry is backward, it is also wishful thinking to develop a high-level manufacturing industry. A topic worth discussing is to sum up the manufacturing industry and the productive service industry for which it directly provides services for observation and analysis, and accordingly put forward a statistical concept of "manufacturing and related service industry", so as to objectively and comprehensively view and promote the coordinated development of manufacturing and service industries.

Regarding the digitization of the real economy, we need to pay attention to the following aspects:

First, the digital transformation of the real economy should be from consumption to production, from circulation to manufacturing. In recent years, the development of the digital economy is mainly distributed in the fields of retail and wholesale, social media and other fields, mainly for individuals. Or rather, focus on how the product reaches the consumer's domain after it is produced. In the next step, the focus should gradually shift to the production process of the product. If the digitization of consumption and circulation is the prelude, the digitization of the production sector is the drama of the development of the digital economy, and it can also substantially improve the quality, efficiency and sustainability of the real economy.

Second, the digital focus of the real economy is gradually shifting to artificial intelligence. To make a small analogy, compared with the real economy, the Internet is equivalent to a channel, 5G technology is the high-speed rail, big data is the raw material, the cloud platform is equivalent to warehousing, and artificial intelligence is a machine and equipment. While other technologies are primarily about generating, transporting, storing, and connecting data, ARTIFICIAL intelligence uses data to produce larger, more valuable data. E-commerce, social media platforms, etc. are mainly the products of data connections in the early days. The rapid development and application of natural language processing, image recognition, intelligent driving, algorithm recommendation, etc., shows the great potential of artificial intelligence technology. The application of artificial intelligence in the real economy can be manifested not only as the optimization of the allocation of production capacity, but also as the real-time perception and prediction decision-making of the macro-economy, industries and specific product market operations, thereby significantly improving the efficiency of resource allocation and the stability of economic operation.

The author is deputy director of the Economic Committee of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference