White Paper on Telecommunications Challenges ICT Surplus Analysis

　The White Paper on Telecommunications. I worked on the editing committee.

　http://www.soumu.go.jp/menu_news/s-news/01tsushin02_02000101.html

　The impact of the growth of the ICT sector is expected to have an upward pressure effect that will result in a real GDP of 33.1 trillion yen in 2020.

　And this white paper was a special version dealing with IoT, big data, and AI. I have extracted some points from it.

　One of the challenges is the ICT consumer surplus analysis.

　“The Second Machine Age” by MIT Sloan’s McAfee and Brynjolfsson points out the “limits of GDP,” as GDP includes production and industrial output, but doesn’t grasp the full value of ICT. It poses the question of how to measure the consumer surplus that gives rise to new products and services.

　I was already aware of this question, but I do not know of an example of successful creation of that index. This time, the white paper dealt resolutely with this matter.

　

　It says, "Although the value of ICT is held by both the company side and the consumer side, while in the end an increase in GDP can be seen in the existing statistics for the company side, the consumer side is not fully captured by these statistics. The analysis covered 1. the consumer surplus, 2. the saving of time, and 3. a focus on information assets.

1. Regarding the consumer surplus (the difference between how much consumers think they should pay for an item and how much they actually pay), an example analysis of a music and video service shows that consumers have a surplus of 150 to 200 yen per month. If we then estimate the annual consumer surplus amount, the total is about 109.7 billion yen.

2. Regarding the saving of time, an analysis of Internet shopping shows that around 40 minutes to 1 hour of time is saved for each time.

3. Regarding information assets (reviews), an analysis of Internet shopping shows that more than 80% of users have had the experience of deciding which product to buy based on reviews.

　I assume the consumer surplus is actually much bigger, but first I want to acknowledge that this subject was dealt with at all. I believe that deepening this analysis and improving its accuracy will be a global contribution.