Indicators to measure Vietnam's digital economy needed

The set of indicators will fully reflect every aspect of the digital economy, including digital infrastructure, the popularity of digital means, online services, and human resources.

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This will be important data for policymakers to release decisions.

In June 2020, the Prime Minister approved the national digital transformation program to 2025 and with the vision until 2030, under which Vietnam strives to join the top 50 countries in e-Government.

To reach the goal, the Prime Minister assigned the Ministry of Planning and Investment (MPI) to join forces with certain ministries and branches to compile a system of statistical criteria on digital economy; and build new methods in collecting data to measure the impact of digital transformation on socio-economic spheres and on people. The indicators will be made public periodically.

According to the General Statistics Office (GSO), the digital economy comprises all economic activities based on digital platforms, using digital technology and data to create new business models. The set of statistical indicators reflects the development and impact of the digital economy on the national economy.

The added value of the digital economy is calculated from the value added thanks to digital infrastructure, digital platforms and digital app services.

The proportion of added value of the digital economy in GDP is the percentage between the total added value created by digital economy and the GDP in the reported period.

Digital infrastructure is the physical technical infrastructure to transmit data and provide digital platforms and digital app services, such as fixed and mobile telecom services, internet connections and internet access services.

Digital platform services are developed on digital infrastructure that creates an environment for digital app services, such as goods e-commerce sites (Shopee, Sendo, Amazon, Alibaba, etc…), stock exchange, social network services (Zalo, Facebook, etc…), and apps on mobile platform to provide services (Uber, Grab, etc…).

Digital app services are services and services using information technology (IT) in general for organizations, businesses and individuals to use in production, business, goods sales and services.

The set of indicators will fully reflect the popularity of digital means (mobile phone users, people with digital identifications, number of Vietnam-made mobile apps per head, number of households that have digital addresses assigned, and more), and the popularity of online services and digital skills of human resources.

Developing a digital economy is one of the priority tasks of Vietnam. Unifying digital economic metrics to provide reliable data is an important task that will help policymakers.

Duy Vu