An interesting report titled “Measuring the Digital Economy” recently published, 8th December, by the OECD (OECD (2014), Measuring the Digital Economy: A New Perspective, OECD Publishing). Chapter titles give a sense for the report – Investing in Smart Infrastructure; Empowering Society; Unleashing Innovation; Delivering Growth and Jobs.
While the analysts give insights into numerous aspects of the global digital economy they highlight one key weakness: there is no consistent statistical framework suitable for either describing or measuring what impact or influence digital capabilities, such as the Internet, are having globally. Action points are suggested for policy makers and national statistical bodies to develop a new schema that may harness the power of “micro data” localised inside individual enterprises or even by individuals. This is a different approach to the centralization of data in large sets managed by bodies such as the Bureau of Statistics.
A few snippets from this lengthy document:
Combined ICT accounts for approximately 25% of the total R&D investment by business (BERD) as shown in the following diagram.
with a notable increase, and increasing, spend on Machine to Machine (M2M), data mining and 3D Printing innovations.
Australia’s comparative BERD spend on this ICT R&D is in the lower third of the OECD members – around 12% in comparison to the average of 25% (the top is South Korea at 53%):
Of Australia’s BERD investment in ICT most, unsurprisingly, is in the services sector:
Consistent with popular belief Australia ranks highly in the penetration of personal digital devices which is shown by the following chart, Australia ranking second just behind Finland:
Drilling down on this data more shows an odd characteristic for the Nordic countries, especially Finland, where most mobile service is not standard but dedicated for unspecified purposes:
Maybe a reflection of some innovative M2M use in the Nordic countries?
Another oddity is for the distribution of autonomous system (AS) routing domains – in terms of total numbers, especially in comparison to population, both Russia and Brazil stand out. The report suggests a higher AS value could reflect greater competition in the digital economy space. While potentially true for the USA I’m not sure it applies to Russia.
A disappointing statistic is the number of female graduates in computer science for the year 2012 (see below), which is consistent across all countries. Further it shows an almost 50% drop in computer science graduates for Australia from 2005 to 2012.
