尼日利亚数字经济借鉴中国经验

在中国，人们几乎可以通过智能手机做所有的事情——包括购买消费品、衣服和电子产品、预定火车票或飞机票、通过移动程序支付费用以及将采购的商品送货上门。

正如北京大学商学院教授杰弗里·托森所言，“在中国，智能手机就是人们生活中重要的交易工具，只要你有了微信和移动支付应用程序，无论你在哪里，支付工具都可以在手机上进行电子商务交易。”

中国是数字化投资大国

根据中国国家互联网信息办公室2019年5月发布的一份报告，2018年，中国数字经济的规模已经达到31.63万亿元（约合4.6万亿美元），占到全国国内生产总值的34.8%。这份在福州市举行的第二届数字中国峰会上公布的报告显示，去年电子商务交易额为31.63万亿元，网络零售额超过9万亿元，网络支付用户超过6亿人。

中国已是全球领先的数字经济投资大国之一，目前正在投资高科技工业园区和孵化器，重点聚焦人工智能、机器人和大数据等技术。像阿里巴巴、腾讯和百度这样的互联网公司也在研究中心、人工智能专家和数据科学家等领域投资多达数十亿美元。

政府正在实施一项为期十年的中国制造2025计划，旨在加速高科技产业的发展。这项计划对中国实现电信、电力设备、机器人、高端自动化和新能源汽车领域的世界领先者的目标做出规划。在技术和创新领域的巨额投资取得了丰硕的成果。截至2018年2月，中国独角兽企业的数量位居世界第二，仅排在美国之后。独角兽企业指的是私人控股的初创企业，估值达到甚至超过了10亿美元。

中国和美国现在都拥有全球最大的数字平台公司，其中包括电子商务巨头阿里巴巴和科技集团腾讯，联合国贸易和发展会议（UNCTAD）发布报告显示，全球70家最大数字平台公司中，七个“超级平台”占总市值的三分之二，其中包括腾讯和阿里巴巴。

尼日利亚向中国学习数字经济发展经验

联合国贸发会议发布的2019年数字经济报告显示，数字经济创造的财富高度集中在美国和中国，世界其他地区，特别是非洲和拉丁美洲国家远远落在后面。报告对尼日利亚则给出了好坏参半的评价——拥有高科技理念，但投资明显不足。
尼日利亚推出了许多雄心勃勃的构想，包括建立政府或私营部门主导的孵化中心、青年创新计划和科技园区。为电子商务和电子银行搭建的数字平台在尼日利亚网民中颇受欢迎。科技行业也取得了一些可喜的进展——在过去9年中其规模增长了一倍多，并在2019年第二季度对国内生产总值的贡献率达到了13.85%。

尼日利亚政府已经充分意识到数字经济的潜力，预计到2021年，它将为尼日利亚提供300万个就业岗位，并创造880亿美元的收入。

2019年10月，政府将负责监督信息和通信技术的部更名为通信和数字经济部。这项决定是为了扩大该部的职能范围，进而根据经济复苏和增长计划（ERGP），实现尼日利亚数字经济发展的目标。经济复苏和增长计划是中央政府制定的一个重要议程。

但是，另一方面，尼日利亚蓬勃兴起的技术产业也面临着挑战，它们大多是由于对关键数字技术基础设施——数字经济的生命线——投资不足造成的。

尼日利亚政府正努力寻求经济的多样化发展，以摆脱对石油的过度依赖。数字经济在当今以技术为主导的世界经济发展中无疑是最佳的替代选择。考虑到世界经济目前尚处在数字驱动的早期阶段，就更应抓住这一机遇。到2022年，全球IP流量预计将达到每秒150700千兆字节。

数字经济的支柱是超级连接，只有在建设数字基础设施和提升教育产业方面投入巨资，才能实现超级连接。因此，仅仅对部门更名是不够的。如果尼日利亚政府真的希望扭转其经济格局，那就必须支持数字技术的发展并对其进行足够的投资。在这方面尼日利亚应当向中国学习，因为中国政府正在对科技产业进行大力投资。

英文版

Digitizing Nigeria's economy: What we can learn from China

By Abdullateef Salau  Journalist for Daily Trust, Nigerian

In China, almost everything happens on smartphones – from shopping consumables, wears and electronics to booking train or air tickets, paying for them through mobile apps and have the purchased items delivered at door steps. It is fair to say that some of the world’s most enthusiastic netizens are Chinese. They message, take photos, and watch videos all day on social media.

As Jeffrey Towson, a business professor at Peking University, noted that in China, "smartphone is the operating system for your life once you had WeChat or mobile payments set up, that enables e-commerce to happen on your phone anywhere you happen to be during your day."

China's digital economy reached 31.3 trillion yuan (4.6 trillion U.S. dollars) in 2018, accounting for 34.8 percent of the country's total GDP, according to a report by the Cyberspace Administration of China in May 2019.

The report, unveiled at the 2nd Digital China Summit in the city of Fuzhou, showed 31.63 trillion yuan of e-commerce trade volume and over 9 trillion yuan of online retail sales last year, as well as more than 600 million users of online payment.

China is among world's top investors in key digital technologies. The country is investing in high-tech industrial parks and incubators focusing on technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics and big data. Internet companies like Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu are investing billions in new research centres, AI experts and data scientists.

The government is working through a 10-year plan, Made in China 2025, to accelerate the development of high-tech industries. The plan outlines how China aims to become a world leader in telecommunication, electrical power equipment, robotics, high-end automation, and new energy vehicles.

This huge spending on technology and innovation has achieved fruitful results. As of February 2018, China ranked second behind the US in terms of its number of unicorns – privately held startup companies valued at $1 billion or more.

China, along with United States, now houses largest digital platform companies, including e-commerce giant Alibaba and tech conglomerate Tencent, which UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) said account for two thirds of the total market value of the top 70 platforms.

Wealth creation in the digital economy is highly concentrated in the United States and China, with the rest of the world, especially countries in Africa and Latin America, trailing considerably far behind, according UNCTAD's Digital Economy Report 2019.

Meanwhile, a mixed picture arises with a view of Nigeria – lofty technology ideas with inadequate investments.
The country has rolled out many ambitious initiatives, including creating government or private sector led incubator hubs, youth innovation programmes, and science technology parks. Digital platforms for e-commerce and electronic banking are popular among Nigerian netizens. The technology sector had recorded some good strides – more than doubling in size over the past nine years, and contributed 13.85 percent to GDP in the second quarter of 2019.
The government is not oblivious of the potential of digital economy, which is projected to create 3 million jobs and generate $88 billion for Nigeria by 2021.

In October 2019, the government renamed a ministry which supervises the ICT sector as Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy.  It said the decision was to further expand the ministry's mandate to capture the goals of digitalisation of the Nigerian economy in line with the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP), one of the key agenda of the central government.

However, Nigeria's burgeoning tech space is faced with challenges, many of which result from inadequate investments in key digital technology infrastructure, the lifewire of digital economy.

As Nigerian government seeks to diversify its economy from over reliance on oil, digital economy provides the best alternative in a technology-dominated world. This is even more so as the world is only in the early days of the data-driven economy. By 2022 global IP traffic is projected to reach 150,700 GB per second.

The backbone of a digital economy is hyperconnectivity, which is only possible with huge investment on building a digital infrastructure and promoting the education sector.

Renaming a government's ministry alone won't achieve much. So, it is imperative that the Nigerian government support the lofty move with sufficient investment in digital technologies if it truly desires to turn its economy around. This is one area Nigeria needs to learn from China where the government is investing heavily on its tech industry.

编辑 | 张  梅

翻译 | 王晓波

设计 | 高  蕊