Introducing Consumer Durable Digital Services into the BEA Digital Economy Satellite Account

Measuring the digital economy is a high priority for analysts of economic growth. We augment the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s Digital Economy Satellite Account to include digital services provided by high-tech consumer durables. We find that including the service flow from these goods raises the growth rate of the digital economy between 2005 and 2021 from 6.4 percent per year to 6.9 percent per year. Consumer durable services accounted for about 10 percent of digital economy GDP within augmented digital economy GDP. While most household services are not digital, the household owns a significant part of the digital infrastructure.