Historically, the best way to measure the success of an economy has been the gross domestic product (GDP), the monetary value of goods and services. But, as the fifth IMF Statistical Forum gets underway in Washington focusing on “Measuring the Digital Economy,” could we get a better idea of economic performance by using digital data? 

GDP is currently the best economic scorecard we have, but it’s heavily reliant on official government data, which misses a lot of financial activity. Given the speed of modern digital economies, it also appears to be rather slow. 

Lau Seng Yee, a senior executive at the Chinese tech giant Tencent, said that is all about to change. 

“The popularization of big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and especially blockchain has provided us with the possibility to construct a multidimensional data information cluster," Lau said. "And the future guiding principle for such so-called innovations might even be real-time data provided by machine intelligence.”  

Social media companies like Google and Facebook have been busy privatizing the data they collect, selling pieces of information to companies wanting to improve their targeting of goods and services. 

Peter Smith is the co-founder of a company called Blockchain, which is at the forefront of the development of digital currencies like bitcoin. He believes the industry will play a big role in providing new data. 

“I think the best piece of news for this audience, as statisticians, as researchers is that the provision of data and access to data because of the open, transparent nature of the technology we build is going to improve in time,” said Smith, “and I think you guys will get better data and faster from our financial system that we’re building than from the legacy financial system that you would draw data from today.”