Web-based indicators have multiple applications to a range of economic and social matters. The research project is currently focusing on the following areas.

Indicators for the export orientation and firm characteristics

The use of the WWW by companies allows the removal of some geographic constraints as well as the instant communication with worldwide clients, suppliers and partners, thus facilitating the entrance and positioning in foreign markets. The foreign orientation is crucial in the context of an expanding economic globalization, in which the internationalization emerges as a priority for firms and economies to prosper in the long term.

Corporate websites contain a diversity of signs about the export orientation of firms, such as having a functional multilingual version available. Given the importance of foreign trade for the developed economies, in this research line we focus on automatically obtaining indicators for the export orientation of firms from corporate websites.

Some of the results of this research line can be found in:

• Web data mining for monitoring business export orientation
• Inferring Export Orientation from Corporate Websites

 

Indicators for technology adoption

Corporate websites are also a reflection of the technology adopted by a firm. This happens because it is possible to directly observe the technology in which its website is implemented, as well as any connection with any other firm’s information system, when this option is available.

In this research line, we analyze corporate websites in an automatized fashion to track changes in the information technologies used by the firm to exchange information with other agents in the value chain (e.g., suppliers and clients). This information will be useful to understand how technology diffusion occurs in the sectors under analysis.

Some of the results of this research line can be found in:

• Location and Adoption of ICT Innovations in the agri-food industry

 

Indicators for the labor market

Job seeking on the Internet is increasingly popular, making it possible that numerous web sites devoted to this end appear. Simultaneously, people that get unemployed use Internet search engines to find information about how to start the procedure for receiving unemployment subsidies.

In this way, both the entrance into and the departure from the employed population leave traces in the Internet. These traces can be analyzed and used to obtain a web-based economic indicator for the unemployment level.

Some of the results of this research line can be found in:

• Web-based indicator for the unemployment level

 

Economic efficiency of cloud systems

In the current technology context, cloud system and infrastructures have been rapidly developed and adopted by a number of firms. However, this adoption has been relatively disorganized. In this research line, we are working on developing a methodology to assess the use and adoption of these services from an economic point of view.

Some of the results of this research line can be found in:

• A Methodology for Economic Evaluation of Cloud-Based Web Applications