Imports of Digitised Products

About this publication

The term ‘Digitised products and services’ covers a wide spectrum of activities within the present economic landscape. Because this spectrum is so wide and sometimes a bit vague, we needed to look into literature and best practices to determine if activities fall within the scope and which do not. Furthermore, many of the statistics available today and the different categories they recognise are not yet well suited for distinguishing between ‘regular’ offline economic activities and their more ‘digital’ counterparts.

This new reality of direct (or semi-direct via a platform) digitised service transfers to and from enterprises or consumers, regardless of their locations, provides new challenges to statisticians. Statistics Netherlands has conducted several projects over the last few years to improve the estimates for these digitised services. For the 2010 revision, estimates for several types of digitised services were implemented in the national accounts. The 2015 revision saw an update and expansion of those estimates, which were also included in the international trade in services statistics. The objective of this project is to create better estimates for the import of digitised services for the 2021 revision of the national accounts; to be published in 2023.