Measuring Economic Activities of China with Mobile Big Data

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how mobile big data, including geo-location and search data, can be used to measure various economic activities in China, offering new insights and methods for economic analysis.

Contribution

It introduces novel indices and methods for measuring employment, consumer trends, store foot traffic, and industry consumption using large-scale mobile data in China.

Findings

Mobile data effectively gauges employment and consumer trends.

Location search data predicts store revenues and detects fraud.

Consumption indicators align with existing economic measures.

Abstract

Emerging trends in smartphones, online maps, social media, and the resulting geo-located data, provide opportunities to collect traces of people's socio-economical activities in a much more granular and direct fashion, triggering a revolution in empirical research. These vast mobile data offer new perspectives and approaches for measurements of economic dynamics and are broadening the research fields of social science and economics. In this paper, we explore the potential of using mobile big data for measuring economic activities of China. Firstly, We build indices for gauging employment and consumer trends based on billions of geo-positioning data. Secondly, we advance the estimation of store offline foot traffic via location search data derived from Baidu Maps, which is then applied to predict revenues of Apple in China and detect box-office fraud accurately. Thirdly, we construct consumption indicators to track the trends of various industries in service sector, which are verified by several existing indicators. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to measure the second largest economy by mining such unprecedentedly large scale and fine granular spatial-temporal data. Our research provides new approaches and insights on measuring economic activities.