Page 161 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 2

IPS195 Gabriel Quirós-Romero et al.
combine properties of currencies, commodities and intangible assets. The IMF
(2019a) recently released a clarification note on The Treatment of Crypto
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Assets in Macroeconomic Statistics that presents an overview of crypto assets
and provides guidance on the classification for their treatment in
macroeconomic statistics based on the current statistical standards and
classifications. At present, Bitcoin-like crypto assets do not meet the definition
of a financial asset, so they should be classified as produced nonfinancial
assets as a distinct sub-category under valuables.
Digitalization: Issues for future consideration. The value of (digital) data.
While much can be addressed by providing more granular or
supplementary statistics, there may be a need to go beyond the current
international standards to better account for the role of data in the modern
digital economy. Data have always had a central role in business decision
making. Businesses strive to gather data on customers, to improve products
and processes to enhance productivity, improve performance, and increase
profitability. As storage and acquisition costs decrease and processing
capacity (software, IT hardware) increases, an explosion in data accumulation
is happening. The simple fact that data is in electronic form allows it to be
analyzed for insights and decision-making at an unprecedented scope and
scale. In some sense, data itself has been transformed: it has become digital
data. This digital data has allowed for new information/knowledge creation
that could not have been done if the data were not in digital form. While initial
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work by the IMF (2019b) has begun, there is not yet any agreement on the
statistical treatment of data, thus further research is needed to determine if
data is an asset and, if so, is it produced or non-produced; as well as how to
determine its value.

5. Economic Welfare
The 6th IMF Statistical Forum (Measuring Economic Welfare: What and
How?) held in November 2018 helped set the framework for what measures
“Beyond GDP” may be needed to better understand changes in economic
welfare in the digital age as GDP is not intended to be a comprehensive
measure of economic welfare. In particular, how the gap between welfare
growth and growth of real private consumption, a measure of economic
welfare, is widening in the presence of new and rapidly changing, often free,
digital services. Furthermore, as governments and international organizations,
such as the IMF, adopt inclusive growth strategies, there is a clear need and
expectation to go beyond measuring the size and aggregated growth of the
economy to understand how the benefits of economic activity are being

6 https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/bop/2019/pdf/Clarification0422.pdf
7 https://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/stats/documents/ece/ces/ge.20/2019/mtg1/IMF.pdf
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