Tapping new economic growth drivers is one of the priorities of China's economic work this year, with the data factor expected to play a bigger role given that its accelerated development is likely to breed new development momentum.

As the world's largest producer of real-time data, China enjoys significant advantages in the development of the digital economy. Surveys indicate that Chinese internet users spend an average of seven hours a day online on mobile terminals. China has the world's largest manufacturing system, and its real economy is accelerating the pace of "cloud usage". China also creates the world's largest amount of data every day at the production end. This, together with the large quantities of urban activity data produced by the operation of smart cities, has built the foundation for its digital economy.

As the value of data becomes increasingly prominent, accelerating the entry of data factors into industrial production and giving play to their multiplier effects in energizing various industries will greatly promote the high-quality development of the digital economy. To this end, the authorities have recently issued a number of documents aimed at activating "dormant data", exploring and expanding the application scenarios of data elements in typical fields, accelerating the bridging of the "digital divide", and promoting the realization of the value of data elements and the release of digital dividends through high-quality development of the digital economy.

Data elements can be reused in multiple scenarios, and a group of data can release new value in repeated usage and thus promote diversified business operations. To promote the "multiplier effects" of data elements, the reuse of data in different scenarios and different fields should be encouraged to foster new products and services, and create new industries and models for economic development.

Despite the digital economy enjoying huge development potential, in the process of promoting the marketization of data elements, it is necessary to properly handle the open sharing of public data and the development and utilization of data resources. China's public data has a large volume, good quality and excellent structure, but it faces such shortcomings as insufficient open sharing and low utilization efficiency. Some legal breakthroughs are also yet to be made concerning privacy protection in its development and utilization.

As an important infrastructure of the digital economy, the construction of China's data factor market also needs to be improved. On the one hand, explorations of market-oriented allocation models of data elements adapted to different industries and fields should be encouraged. On the other hand, on the basis of respecting the development law of the digital economy, the authorities should accelerate the formulating of a scientific, reasonable and efficient data system that conforms to the characteristics of China's data factor market.

ECONOMIC DAILY