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E-commerce and financial statistics: a report of a halfday meeting of the Financial Statistics Users Group
By Graham Clark (Bank of England) Tel 020 7601 5356 Email:Graham.Clark@bankofengland.co.uk
The following is a summary of a meeting hosted by Barclays Bank plc on 9 May 2000. The meeting
was chaired by Colin Jameson of Barclays and included speakers from IBM, the Office for National
Statistics (ONS), the Association of British Insurers (ABI) and the on-line bank Egg. The views
expressed within the FSUGs meetings, and recorded here, are those of the speakers and do not
necessarily represent the views of their organisations or the Bank of England.
2005, a third company thought there would then be fewer
users than this (301mn), whilst a fourth suggested that
one-sixth of the worlds population (1bn) would be online.
Understanding e-commerce
The first speaker was Keith Telford, an economist at
IBM Global Services. He began by referring to a report
on the IT industry commissioned a decade ago by the
Economic and Social Research Council from Professor
Ian Miles of Manchester University. This concentrated
on official statistics and concluded that whilst their
integrity and comprehensiveness provided a basic
framework, they lacked the detail on companies, products
and future developments which business requires.
Indeed, classifications used today have not kept up with
the rapid pace of change in the industry over the
intervening ten years.
Third, forecasts of the growth of the IT industry and ecommerce frequently ignored inflation, the business
cycle and one-off events. Indeed, when IBM approached
a number of market researchers to assess the scale of
opportunities afforded by Y2K, several were unaware of
the latter. Yet it had been identified in the USA some 18
months earlier and been the subject of rolling public
education programmes there, and some of these
researchers had published forecasts beyond the end of
1999.
These methodological flaws led to wide variations in
private statistics, of which Keith cited two examples.
First, the official estimate of the turnover of the UK
software services industry in 1998 was 30bn, an
increase of 31% on the previous year, but two principal
non-official sources estimated it to be around half this
and annual growth as low as 13%. Second, a US
company which produces estimates by synthesising other
companies research suggested there were 130mn
internet users worldwide in 1999, whilst another
company claimed 313mn. In projecting numbers for