EISE

Outline

Accessing business microdata for research purposes at the Canadian Centre for Data Development and Economic Research (CDER) at Statistics Canada

• CDER basics
• Data sets available for access to CDER
• Application process
• Future directions
• Other information

The digital economy and technological innovations have been the transformational force for most nations over the last decade. Countries that lead in productivity and economic growth, e.g.,the U.S., benefit tremendously from their firms’ successful exploitation of different elements of the digital economy in tandem with policy support. For example, until recently, Internet retailers in the U.S. were not required to collect taxes from a consumer unless the retailer had a nexus in the consumer’s state. This has arguably facilitated the growth of e-commerce and made it an important part of the overall economy. Today, businesses and individuals are interacting in new and complex ways in the digital economy, with rapid technological advances contributing to exponential growth in data, generating compelling research questions. The ability to analyze and understand different facets of the current economy – to generate insights about these new and intriguing phenomena and to effectively leverage these developments to maximize economic growth – pose important challenges for modern organizations and policy makers. As expected, existing research has been instrumental in understanding and addressing some of these challenges associated with the digital economy. New research is continually making meaningful contributions to firms’ strategies and informing economic policy; albeit, there is room to do much more. With the ever changing nature of technology, these opportunities will never cease. At the risk of oversimplifying a growing and diverse literature, this commentary provides a brief glimpse of the existing works and highlights some interesting outstanding issues that warrant attention from the research community and that can now be studied with data made available from Statistics Canada.

It is well recognized that Canada has been lagging in the digital economy and in productivity compared to other developed nations, especially the U.S. Unfortunately, a similarly dismal picture exists in terms of research utilizing data from Canadian sources. As a result, an understanding of issues related to the Canadian digital economy is significantly lacking. While the lack of data has been the primary barrier for research studies, the reality is that Canadians have been profoundly impacted by the digital revolution. Canada’s proximity to the U.S., the increasing presence of U.S. companies in the Canadian market, a resurgence of advanced technology based manufacturing in the U.S., and rapid technological advancements in other competing nations are just some examples of how the insulation of Canadian businesses is dissipating. Canadian firms cannot hide from the digital economy in the long run, rather they need to embrace it. So, research informed by Canadian data will not only provide a much needed and better understanding of the digital economy, but will also likely make significant contributions to theoretical knowledge building.

In the following sections, I discuss some of the important aspects of the digital economy and how the unprecedented access to administrative and survey data from Statistics Canada opens tremendous opportunities to answer many research questions, such as the relationships between competition and firm productivity, efficiency, innovation, and technological growth.