In terms of the impact on the GDP of their home country, WeChat's influence is about 2.4 times that of Facebook, according to a latest study.
The result is based on data from a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a report from the Institute of Industry and Planning of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.
Would anyone suspend from using Facebook for 1 month to get $ 67.46 in compensation?
This is a question posed by the team of MIT researchers Erik Brynjolfsson, and it may help economists better gauge free new technologies for the economy and consumer life Degree of influence.
Brynjolfsson's research team estimates that if calculated in terms of the benefits to users, Facebook can drive US GDP growth by 0.11 percentage points per year. The team presented the paper at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association.
The paper answers a larger question facing economists: How much does technology improve people's lives? Traditionally, economists have answered this question by calculating the impact of innovation on the increase in people's income, and the answer usually shows the growth of GDP, a less perfect but reasonable indicator.
However, when the technology that changes society is free, the difficulty of answering this question will increase greatly. Of course, there are hidden costs to "free" products and services.
Facebook, Twitter, GPS map services and other mobile applications are free applications, they will not be reflected in GDP data, nor will they be reflected in traditional productivity measures-although they do improve our lives, improve work effectiveness.
To solve this problem, the research team of Brynjolsson conducted the first series of experiments and investigations to find out the monetary value of some free products and services in people's minds. They use an indicator they call GDP-B-not based on real costs but based on perceived benefits.
They found that in a representative sample of US Internet users, the median cost of a one-month suspension of Facebook was $ 56.9.
In a survey conducted in the Netherlands, they found that Facebook's WhatsApp app is the most valuable, and a one-month suspension requires users to compensate for an astonishing 535.73 euros; Facebook ranks second with a "value" of about 100 euros; Twitter "value" Less than 1 Euro.
Similar to Facebook, WeChat is also a free social application, which has a significant impact on our society and economy. According to 2017 data released by the Institute of Industry and Planning of the China Academy of Information and Communication Technology, WeChat boosted information consumption by 209.7 billion yuan-accounting for about 0.26% of China's GDP (82754 billion yuan) that year, and accounting for 4.7% of China's total information consumption.
In addition, WeChat also drove traditional consumption of 333.9 billion yuan-0.4% of GDP. WeChat also led to a social employment scale of 20.30 million people, of which 4.96 million were directly employed and 15.34 million were indirectly employed. The survey also showed that 93.8% of users said WeChat has brought convenience to life.
