At the 10th World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Meeting (WTIM) in Bangkok, Thailand on 26 September, UNCTAD will be leading a discussion between ministries of ICT, national statisticians and international organizations on how e-commerce measurement can support ICT policies.
Discussants will be looking at the challenge posed by measuring the growing e-commerce at the domestic, regional and international levels. The session will feature experts from the Korea Association for IT Promotion (KAIT), the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UNESCWA), and the Universal Postal Union (UPU).
The number of enterprises and households purchasing and selling goods over the Internet continues to expand. Mobile Internet has just begun to reveal its potential for new types of commercial and financial services and transactions. While business-to-business purchases are the most common form of e-commerce, there are no precise statistics on their value and volume with respect to overall domestic or international trade. Accurately measuring e-commerce is important to support the ability of governments to adopt appropriate measures towards reaping greater development gains from such transactions. At the same time, the private sector would be able to make more informed investment decisions.
The discussion in Bangkok will review available data on e-commerce, examine how progress can be made in measuring e-commerce based on the current core indicators and alternative sources of data, and consider the need for new indicators to capture, for example, the value of e-commerce (nationally and internationally) and mobile commerce. The results of the discussion will feed into future revisions of information economy indicators.
Key questions include:
What is the current status of e-commerce measurement? What data sources are available and how are they being tapped?
What trends in e-commerce are relevant to be measured? How can this information be useful to governments and the private sector?
What is needed to get more and better data on e-commerce?
What role do regulators and the private sector (providers, IT associations, market research and e-commerce companies) play and what could be their contribution to e-commerce measurement?
What can be regarded as good practices in the area of e-commerce measurement?
UNCTAD is organizing this discussion session at the WTIM on behalf of the Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development. The 10th WTIM, 25 - 27 September, is organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and hosted by the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (MICT) of Thailand.
