NANJING—The 2019 Jiangsu Youth Think Tank Scholar Salon “Comprehensive Well-Being and the Private Economy” was recently held at Nanjing Normal University. Participating scholars agreed that the private sector plays an important role in pushing forward China’s development and that innovation is necessary for the country’s highquality development.

Wang Zhikai, deputy director of the Center for Research of Private Economy at Zhejiang University, said that the digital economy is an important direction in the private sector’s innovative development. It can also help private enterprises establish an industrial internet and transform manufacturing through informatization. The private sector should reshape traditional industries into new ones by changing their development modes and promoting their value chains, via emerging information technologies brought by Internet Plus and new e-commerce activities, Wang said. We should increase investment in education, medical care and elderly care, increase opportunities for equitable regional development and promote equal access to social public services. This is essential for consumption to drive economic transformation and upgrading, Wang said.

How private enterprises take an active part in the deep regional cooperation around the Yangtze River Delta has drawn scholars’ attention. Bu Hai, director of the Jiangsu Private Economy Research Base, said that there are still invisible barriers for private enterprises to participate in the deep regional cooperation. We should optimize the top-level design at the national level to form a proper macropolicy support system, establish a public information platform for regional cooperation, and cancel policies with restrictive clauses in order to break down administrative regional barriers by establishing policy reciprocity, Bu suggested. Meanwhile, we should give full play to the mediating role of chambers of commerce to help local enterprises cooperate with those of other areas in the Yangtze River Delta, Bu said.