Capturing the Digital Economy: A Proposed Measurement Framework and its Applications

This special supplement to Key Indicators for Asia and the Pacific 2021 seeks to define the core digital economy anchored on input-output analytical framework from the national statistics offices. The framework on selected economies presents the significant measures of digital economy and digitally dependent industries in gross domestic product. Moreover, other methods and data are employed to examine key digital economy phenomena and trends in relation with sectoral linkages, temporal price changes, jobs, global value chains, COVID-19, and Industry 4.0. This special supplement produces various statistics and insights that may aid researchers and policymakers in the usage of digitalization metrics and serves as a starting point for subsequent digital economy analyses.

The KI special supplement contains the estimates of digital economy and digitally dependent industries in gross domestic product using the input-output table framework and a more comprehensive range of statistics relevant to analyzing sectoral linkages, temporal price changes, employment, global value chains, COVID-19, and Industry 4.0. The tables and indicators presented are derived from supply and use tables, input-output tables, and related data published by various national statistics offices and international databases, including the Multiregional Input-Output database maintained by the Asian Development Bank.