On 14 May 2020, the Government published a report reviewing the evidence base on UK cross-border digital trade and identifying potential improvements to data sources.
The research was carried out by Cambridge Econometrics on behalf of the Department for International Trade and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and is designed to provide further understanding about the nature and scale of digital trade.
The report does the following:
- provides an overview of efforts to define the concept of digital trade, focussing especially on the OECD’s ’Handbook on Measuring Digital Trade’
- reviews the evidence base on digital trade to identify definitional issues; measurement and methodological challenges; coverage of data on digital trade in official statistics and their associated strengths and weaknesses; and non-conventional methods to estimate the value of digital trade (such as credit card data)
- identifies possible sources of data on digital trade and compiles relevant statistics for the UK
- identifies data gaps and proposes ways to fill them
More information on this and the full report can be found here.