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Experts on New Economy, Development
The thriving new economy has provided developing countries with an opportunity to develop their economies faster and the hope of sustainable development, said Ma Songde, vice minister of Science and Technology Thursday.
Ma made these remarks at an international symposium on the new economy and development, cosponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
The new economy "allows those countries not to totally follow the inherent development model of economic technology shift," instead, "they can rationally utilize the development platform of the new economy to accelerate the self-upgrading of traditional industrial sectors and greatly improve the quality and efficiency of their national economic performance."
"Along with the development of the new economy, knowledge and information divide gaps have become a major problem, and some developing countries are on the edge of poverty and crisis," he said.
Vice President of the China Institute of International Studies Zhen Bingxi said that thanks to the decreasing costs of modern information technology, developing countries are able to enter the information age at the high point of the learning curve and at the low point of the cost curve.
"The use of information-related technologies in various sectors of the national economy will help reshape the traditional industries, and the industrial structure can be readjusted and optimized, leading to a transition from a scale-oriented mode to an efficiency-oriented one and from the labor-intensive industries to knowledge-based ones."
Professor Robert Bedeski from the University of Victoria in Canada said that China is experiencing the first steps of the new economy -- one that is increasingly dependent on and linked to the latest information and communication technology.
"To be competitive in the global market, China must master the technology of information and communication hardware and software as the first step," he said.
According to experts, the term "new economy" was first used to describe the performance of the economy in the United States that grew at a staggering pace for almost a decade at the end of last century, producing the longest expansion in US history. Its three elements are a knowledge-based economy, an information-dominated economy and a globalized economy.
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