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The major problems regarding digital economy are associated with its identification and classification as per the standard norms of industrial classification. Tapscott’s (2015) groundbreaking work has also failed to offer a comprehensive structure of the digital economy other than ‘having to do something with internet, computer, and money’.
Marxian economists like Balkin (2008) and Zuboff (2019) have claimed that it is a new stage of capitalism that has emerged after the Fordist era which has led to “surveillance capitalism” and culminating into “surveillance state”. In view of the structural difficulties to define the nature of digital economy, Jordan (2020) has proposed to define the digital economy in terms of economic practices. He has treated “digital economic practices as repeated and patterned habits of creating, exchanging and consuming a huge range of goods and commodities that make up the wealth of society, while understanding that often the meanings of these commodities must themselves emerge from within those practices”. The basic difference between the digital economic practice and the common economic practice is that each digital practice is defined by a community of activities which offers a scope of monetization. He has further highlighted two forms of causations for digital economic practices. The first form of causation lies in the way when an action may be ‘formed and reformed in multiple settings and multiple meanings’ with different agents while these different uses and application do not necessarily reconcile to a single, consistent or unified moment or action. The second form of causation is related to collection and generation of information regardless of platforms which are not fully formed but ready to be distributed and termed as informational actions (Jordan, 2015). The key causal mechanism for both the digital economic practices is related to the segregation of the produced information (data) as property which originates from the informational actions. Jordan (2020) has mentioned three different ways in which information can be transformed into property such as public domain, private property, and distributed property. These processes are linked by three divisions: value, property, and profit. The relationship between these three divisions is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Digital economic practices (Source: Jordan, 2020; p. 185)
Tapscott (2015) has identified 12 salient themes of the new economy as:
Thus taking into consideration the extremely complex and dynamic nature of digital economy in view, an attempt has been made to formulate a Digitization Impact Index (DII) based on two conventional statistical methods: first, by means of the Changing Base Year Method (Base Year: 2008) and second, by using the Fixed Base Year Method (Base Year: 2008) (Das, 2008) for a sample size of 6 European countries in a time series study of 10 years (2009 – 2018).