Cross-Border Data Exchanges : The Rise of Platform Economy in Asia

Transnational flows of goods, capital, and labor are accurately monitored, and are included by governmental agencies in their economic metrics as critical information used by policy makers. Although transnational flows of data can be intuitively identified as equally important, they have been so far largely ignored by economists and are poorly monitored by public authorities. In this paper, we study the extent to which local and foreign intermediation platforms in Asia have developed their activities in Asia, and their contribution to cross-border data exchanges. We rely on preliminary measure of transnational as well as global data exchanges in Asia. We identify various patterns; China is mostly relying on national platforms, while Japan is highly dependent from platforms based in the United States, Korea and Taiwan are experiencing some sort of balance between national and foreign platforms.