The central bank’s move is in line with other international organizations that have begun discussing whether the current measurement of GDP is able to collect data on the growing digital sharing economy.
In South Korea, about 1,400 households were registered as “urban lodging business providers” at the end of 2016, but the number of private homes offering short-term lodging through online platforms is much higher, as BOK stated. Currently, such unregistered private lodging service providers are thought to produce about 0.005% of the nominal GDP per year, or Won 81.9 billion.
The BOK plans to study the nation’s digital-sharing economy from the third quarter, and develop calculation methods to measure them by the first half of 2018.
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