Page 282 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 4

STS587 Shujian X. et al.
China's digital economy satellite account framework combines the
characteristics of the above two. It selects key departments related to the
digital economy and extends the production boundary of the central
framework accordingly. This will effectively link China's digital economy
satellite accounts with the traditional national economic classification, and can
highlight new industries and products in digital economy. In order to explain
the methods and techniques of digital economy satellite account more clearly,
we compare the design of digital economic satellite accounts with
conventional internal satellite accounts and external satellite accounts
respectively. Its main connection with internal satellite account is that both of
them require to identify the key activities based on the current classification.
Their difference is that digital economy satellite account also requires the
identification of non-digital products or industries other than digital ones. This
is because the deep integration of digital technology and the real economy
enables non-digital products to be traded through digital technology to have
the characteristics of digital economy. For example, although there are non-
digital products of e-retailers on large e-commerce platforms such as Taobao
and Jingdong in China, their use of the platform to deliver the transaction
order and payment makes it an important part of the digital economy.

2.2 The accounting mechanism of digital satellite account
Based on the above analysis, the mechanism for identifying key activities
in China's digital economy satellite accounts was constructed. Essentially,
digital economy is the digitization of the real economy, that is, using digital
technology and infrastructure to store information on production relations,
economic transactions, product supply and demand etc. in the real economy
in the form of binary bits. Therefore, the identification of key activities in the
digital economy encompasses identification of digital economic transactions
which includes three categories: the digitalization of voucher, the digitization
of supply and demand information, and the digitization of content
information.
First, the digitization of the voucher makes the transaction relationship
between economic units have a record. At this time, the specific digital
platform records the order, receipt, invoice, etc. in a digital form which
broadens the credit mechanism of the transaction and makes people dare to
trade with more and more strangers, thus expanding the scale and scope of
related transactions; secondly, the digitization of supply and demand
information reduces the friction in transactions when the digital platform
collects information from both parties and obtains certain data access rights,
or it may proactively provide supply and demand matching and matching
services, thereby reducing the information search cost of both the supply and
demand sides. Finally, the digitalization of the content information makes the
real world knowledge and other information digital and its transactions are

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