China is adding new instruments to its economic dashboard that will incorporate big data to help better track innovation and entrepreneurship in the new economy, the South China Morning Post reports. Three indicators tracking innovation, entrepreneurship and the new economy are rolling out this year to gauge output in those fast-moving, category-bending and hard-to-measure sectors. All three will be distilled partly from massive hauls of big data from the internet. All three combine data culled from social media and elsewhere online with more traditional sources to show what’s happening in start-ups, high-end services and technology. While old drivers like factory output or coal production are easy to measure, it’s much tougher for smaller businesses and services, which accounted for more than half of output last year for the first time.
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