Valuing the digital economy of New Zealand

The present paper provides estimates of the value of the digital economy of New Zealand through the use of the supply-use tables. By design, no changes are made to the production boundary as the products being assessed are already included within the production boundary and gross domestic product (GDP). The approach is a practical attempt at using the framework first presented in the paper entitled “Measuring digital trade: towards a conceptual framework”, and in particular, the “nature” component of the framework. This is extended to the whole economy to identify “digital” transactions in the country’s National Accounts Commodity Classification. The main finding from this paper is that the “digitally ordered” and “digitally delivered” aspects of the framework were able to be broadly applied. However, the significant material assumptions and the broad nature of the product classification at the aggregate level meant that our estimates were not of high quality. For the year ending March 2015, the estimate of the value of gross output of New Zealand that can be delivered digitally was 27.9 billion New Zealand dollars (NZ$) (US$18.8 billion), while for digitally ordered gross output, it was NZ$109.2 billion.