Abstract: The rapid development of the digital economy not only injects new impetus and vitality into the high-quality development of China’s economy, but also puts forward the requirements of the times for the production of high-quality data elements and the implementation of data finance in the digital economy era. By revealing the connotation characteristics, reasonable boundary and formation mechanism of data finance in the era of digital economy, this paper systematically explores the intrinsic connection between data elements, data finance and economic growth. It is found that the formation efficiency of data capital is positively proportional to the population size, consumption expenditure, etc.. There is an appropriate scale of data finance, and either too high or too low corporate tax rate is not conducive to the formation of data capital, and similar findings exist in the data licensing royalties. The higher the efficiency of data capital usage and the higher the efficiency of government spending on data capital, the higher the overall economic growth rate will be. The spatial flow and use of data capital will reduce regional economic development gaps and help achieve the goal of common prosperity. To this end, China should further improve the top-level institutional design of data finance, build a national platform for the opening, sharing and exploitation of government data, ensure the safety of government data opening and market operation, and give full play to the mechanism and effectiveness of data elements and data finance to promote the development of digital economy.

Key words: digital economy, data finance, data elements, economic growth