The OECD-WTO handbook defines digital trade as trade that is digitally ordered and/or delivered. This includes both goods and services. To my knowledge there are no estimates of digital trade for ASEAN except in a recent article by Stojkoski (and others). Stojkoski uses corporate/company revenues to derive estimates of digital trade for 189 countries for the years 2016-21. The paper provides two views of digital trade. The first is the fiscal (or subsidiary) view, which allocates revenue to locations where the subsidiaries are based. This view makes Ireland look like a major exporter even though we know that that these are primarily exports of American companies and not Irish. What I present below is the second view or the headquarters view (for the most recent available year 2021) which provides a more realistic view of digital trade. Here the revenues are allocated to the location of the headquarters of the country. Data for both views is provided in supplementary information by Stojkoski.
These estimates are best viewed as ‘low’ estimates since they only cover a subset of digital products. Stojkoksi’s estimates include pure digital goods such as videos, games and music, productized services such as cloud computing, social media and search and digital transaction fees from online accommodation services, or the fees charged by Booking.com but not the value of the accommodation.
There is no point ranking countries with concentrated data since we know that the US and China will dominate the headquarters view. Sure enough, in 2021, the US accounted for 73% of exports of digital products followed by China at 12%; the other 187 countries contribute the remaining 15%. To keep my kiasu Singaporean frens happy, Singapore was in the top 10 and ranked 7th with an export share of 1.2%, after Japan (2.3% – ranked 4th) and South Korea (2.2% – ranked 5th). India is not a player in this space. It was ranked 31st with an export share of 0.0001%. Other than China (mainland), Singapore was the only country in North and South-east Asia with a positive trade balance. This is significant, since only 5 of the 189 countries were net-exporters.
In 2021 ASEAN’s total exports of digital products were USD 11.57 billion and Singapore’s share in these was 98%. The remaining 2% was accounted for by Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Viet Nam. The smaller ASEAN economies, Lao, Brunei and Myanmar had zero exports, Cambodia although included above as an exporter, had minimal exports (USD 0.2 million) and Timor Leste was not included in the sample. The share of Intra-ASEAN exports was 41%. As in the case of digitally delivered services, Singapore dominates ASEAN’s digital products trade. As the following table shows annual export growth was in double digits for all ASEAN exporters (growth in exports of digitally delivered services is shown for comparison).
Main export destinations and import sources are shown in the following two figures. The destinations shown in the figure accounted for anywhere between 70 to over 90% of individual ASEAN economy exports.
Import sources/origins are more concentrated due to the dominance of the U.S. The sources shown in the figure accounted for roughly 95% of individual ASEAN economy imports.
Sources
Stojkoski, V., Koch, P., Coll, E. and Hidalgo, C.A., Estimating digital product trade through corporate revenue data. Nature Communications 15, 5262 (2024).
WTO: Digitally delivered services dataset (DDS).
IMF-OECD-UNCTAD-WTO Handbook on Measuring Digital Trade, second edition, 2023.
Notes
The paper by Stojkoksi et. al. (Nature article) provides data based on a fiscal or subsidiary view and on a headquarters view where subsidiary revenues are allocated to the country of headquarters. The data are from corporate revenues and include firms that we have all heard of such as Oracle, IBM, Apple, Alphabet, Expedia, Alibaba and Baidu etc. They have (consumption) data on roughly 60 countries and 31 ‘sectors’ or categories of digital products and they use machine learning methods to extend this to another 129 countries. The final sample has trade data for 189 countries for the years 2016 to 2021. Since they estimate consumption, the trade data used here are their ‘estimates’ which obviously have lower and upper confidence bounds.
In their paper, they discuss primarily the ‘fiscal view’. Based on email communication with the lead author, I can confirm that the fiscal view or the subsidiary assignment corresponds to mode 3 of GATS or supply through commercial presence and the headquarters view corresponds to mode 1 or cross-border supply. In general, the modes must add up to total supply, so for example the DDS (digitally delivered services) dataset makes certain assumptions about the proportion of mode 1 for a particular category of digital services: R&D services 90% is assumed to be mode 1 and the reminder 10% if allocated to mode 4.
In the nature article the approach is different, the fiscal view shows all trade as mode 3 and the headquarters view shows it as mode 1. The two cannot be added up.
Although the data in the Nature article and WTO data on digitally delivered services are not comparable, I use Singapore’s exports to provide an example. In 2021 Singapore’s exports of digital products (Nature article) were USD 11 billion, whereas the estimate of exports of digitally delivered services (WTO data) was USD 156 billion.
ASEAN: Categories of exports and imports
Since data on consumption is estimated for 129 countries, I don’t report it here on a country-specific basis since I suspect the values for ASEAN economies are estimated. The shares of the categories are much too similar to represent reality. But to provide the reader a flavour:
All the exporting ASEAN economies (IDN, MYS, PHL, THA and VNM) exported only two of 31 product categories in 2021: apps and games. The share of apps in total exports was 90-95% for IDN, MYS and THA. For PHL, the share of games was 90%. For VNM the shares were roughly 50% for each of the two categories. SGP had five exports: digital media (video & PC games) 32%, online marketplace (32%), games (24%), apps (6%) and payment services 6%.
Digital advertising (23-28%), online marketplace (18-22%), cloud computing (16-19%) were the main imports of all ten ASEAN economies (import shares in parentheses).
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