Definition of Digital Economy for the Purposes of Statistical Research

The international agenda for the development of monitoring of digital transformation stimulates the development of a statistical methodology for measuring phenomena and processes in the digital economy. The barrier to the formation of a set of interrelated and comparable indicators of the development of the digital economy is the lack of a definition of this concept that would satisfy all interested parties.

To date, experts from various fields of science have proposed a wide range of definitions of the digital economy. Based on the various properties and effects of digitalization, experts characterize the digital economy not only as a phenomenon in economic activity but also as a sociocultural phenomenon. Many of the proposed definitions are theoretical in nature and do not fully satisfy the needs of empirical research.

The objective of this study is to formulate a definition of the digital economy for statistical research.

Therefore, the authors reviewed the works analyzing various definitions of the digital economy, and, accordingly, the sources that proposed definitions of the digital economy.

Due to plethora of digital economy definitions, to reveal the essence of this concept the authors used statistical text analysis (Text Mining) tools, which made it possible to identify a set of key terms defining digital economy. For analysis, was built a text corpus, consisting of 105 English-language and Russian-language definitions taken from various sources, including documents of state strategic planning, publications of international organizations, analytical materials of consulting companies and articles of individual authors.

Thus, the study analyzed the concept of the digital economy for the period and nature of origin, and also proposed an approach based on which an operational definition of the digital economy was developed that meets the relevant principles. However, to identify the digital economy as an object of statistical research, along with the proposed definition, it is necessary to develop a classification of elements of the infrastructure of the digital economy, all of which will allow the formation of an agreed system of tatistical indicators.

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