The daily use of computers and the World Wide Web leaves traces of our actions and movements. The reduction in the costs of transmitting, processing and storing data has made it possible to analyze these traces and to relate them to the evolution of some socioeconomic variables.

This research lab pursues to verify and quantify the relation between what happens in the WWW and the evolution of the economy with the purpose of providing web-based economic indicators (WEI). These indicators have a number of advantages compared to other classic economic indicators:

• They are inexpensive to produce, since all the process can be automated.
• Their availability is almost immediate, compared to the months that processing other indicators might take.
• They gather the behavior of a huge number of agents which would be prohibitive to other methods (such as surveys).
• The level of granularity that they are able to provide (even individually) is out of reach for other methods that only can reach an estimate of the aggregate level of a variable.

In addition, the representativeness of web-based economic indicators increases as the use of the WWW does.

This project is conducted by a multidisciplinary team of researchers from the Group of International Economics and Development (GEID) of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV).

This website is part of the project PID2019-107765RB-I00 funded by the MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.

Recent research grants received by the lab include:

• Digital footprint, competitiveness and business demography
  Grant number: PID2019-107765RB-I00
  Funded by the National Research Agency
• Boosting the culture of public policy evaluation
  Grant number: S0890000
  Funded by the Generalitat Valenciana (Valencian regional government)