(Yicai Global) July 22 -- The measurement of economic development will come to rely on data use more than the traditional gauge of industrial energy consumption, The Paper reported today, citing Jack Ma, executive chairman of tech giant Alibaba Group Holding.

The shift will affect everyone's future, Ma told the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation China Chief Executive Officer Forum 2019.

"The changes brought about by the digital economy will affect our children, and our children's children, over the next 100 years," he said, noting that China was one of the first places to embrace the digital economy.

Alibaba's home city of Hangzhou, the capital of China's eastern Zhejiang province, was the nation's first to embrace the digital economy. Ma believes that the scenes being played out in Hangzhou, where Alibaba fintech affiliate and Alipay operator Ant Financial Services Group is also based, will soon become normal in many cities worldwide.

"Today, Hangzhou residents only need to go out with a mobile phone instead of a wallet, a lot of things can be done on the cellphone, this is the normal life," Ma said.

He also said that imperfect globalization, instead of globalization itself, has caused many problems in the world. Globalization over the past 30 years has been pushed by 60,000 large companies, while future globalization will be jointly advanced by at least 60 million firms, thanks to the digital economy.

"It's likely that none of the businesses that will play a role in global trade in future are familiar to us today, and more and more new small firms will emerge and advance globalization together," Ma said.

Therefore, what we should be thinking about today is not how to maintain or protect yesterday, but to win and create tomorrow, he added.