Free Services from the Digital Economy: Do We Need to Measure Their Value and How?

[eng] For several years now, the economy has seen a change in consumption habits, driven by the development of digital technology. New products and services and new economic models have emerged, and value chains have changed. This raises many questions for national accounting, including how to take new forms of free services into account. There are three possible options for trying to assign these services a monetary value: (a) on the basis of the advertising income for those services that are indirectly financed through advertising, (b) direct valuation of the service provided to the users, by assessing their willingness to pay or by using the standard methods for valuing time spent on domestic tasks, and (c) valuing the data generated through the use of these services, which constitute another way of guaranteeing the immediate and long-term profitability of such services. Beyond practical difficulties of their implementation, another issue is that the three options do not all answer the same questions, which ultimately raises the issue of the purpose of the national accounts.