Estimating digital product trade through corporate revenue data

Viktor Stojkoski, Philipp Koch, Eva Coll and Cesar Hidalgo
Additional contact information
Philipp Koch: Université de Toulouse & CIAS Corvinus University of Budapest
Eva Coll: Université de Toulouse & CIAS Corvinus University of Budapest

Nature Communications, 2024, vol. 15, issue 1, 1-15

Abstract: Abstract Despite global efforts to harmonize international trade statistics, our understanding of digital trade and its implications remains limited. Here, we introduce a method to estimate bilateral exports and imports for dozens of sectors starting from the corporate revenue data of large digital firms. This method allows us to provide estimates for digitally ordered and delivered trade involving digital goods (e.g. video games), productized services (e.g. digital advertising), and digital intermediation fees (e.g. hotel rental), which together we call digital products. We use these estimates to study five key aspects of digital trade. We find that, compared to trade in physical goods, digital product exports are more spatially concentrated, have been growing faster, and can offset trade balance estimates, like the United States trade deficit on physical goods. We also find that countries that have decoupled economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions tend to have larger digital exports and that digital exports contribute positively to the complexity of economies. This method, dataset, and findings provide a new lens to understand the impact of international trade in digital products.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49141-z Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Estimating Digital Product Trade through Corporate Revenue Data (2024)
Working Paper: Estimating digital product trade through corporate revenue data (2024)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:15:y:2024:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-024-49141-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-49141-z

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().