How big is China's digital economy?

Alicia Garcia-Herrero () and Jianwei Xu ()
Additional contact information
Alicia Garcia-Herrero: Adjunct Professor, Department of Economics, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Jianwei Xu: Associate professor, Beijing Normal University
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Alicia Garcia Herrero

No 2018-56, HKUST IEMS Working Paper Series from HKUST Institute for Emerging Market Studies

Abstract: This paper reviews international measures of the digital economy with those developed by Chinese officials and private sources. Given their lack of comparability, we use China's input and output and census data to come up with an internationally comparable estimate of China's size of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector (the core of digital economy), both in terms of value added and employment. Based on the latest available statistics, our measurements indicate that China's digital economy is not bigger relative to the size of the Chinese economy than the OECD average, especially in terms of ICT employment. This finding, which might look striking based on the current perception of China's digital economy, masks large differences across regions (with Beijing, Guangdong and Shanghai ahead of the OECD average).

Pages: 14 pages
Date: 2018-07, Revised 2018-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-ict and nep-pay
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://iems.ust.hk/assets/publications/working-papers-2018/iemswp2018-56.pdf First version, 2018 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: How big is China’s digital economy? (2018)
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:hku:wpaper:201856

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HKUST IEMS Working Paper Series from HKUST Institute for Emerging Market Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Carla Chan ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).