Moreover, so far, primarily statistics on e-commerce sales are available, which implies that cross-border e-commerce statistics mainly refer to exports and rarely to imports, the report, titled ‘Measuring the value of E-commerce’ noted.

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The focus is on business e-commerce, which is the main component of e-commerce. There is a considerable variety of statistics available from various economies, but those also exhibit considerable variation in terms of definitions, approaches to e-commerce value, survey questions, data sources, methods and scopes underpinning them, the report said.

“There is a need to take action to support the development of robust, exhaustive, and internationally comparable statistics on the value of e-commerce across countries—including both developed and developing countries,” the report’s summary noted.

After discussing the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches described in the report and considering the potential for standard measures, appropriate statistical guidelines may be developed to measure e-commerce, it said.

The UNCTAD Working Group on Measuring E-commerce and the Digital Economy, at its third meeting held on 28-29 November 2022, resolved to recommend that UNCTAD should continue working towards developing statistical guidelines on measuring the value of e-commerce (including cross-border e-commerce); and that a task group of interested working group participants should be established to guide, oversee and contribute to the development of the necessary measurement standards and guidelines.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (DS)