Fifteenth International Conference on Technology, Knowledge & Society

Abstract

Approximately a decade into the cloud era, we are only now beginning to understand just how large and quickly it has grown as a commercial enterprise. New and recent research has documented clear benefits from cloud technology for businesses, reducing operational costs and increasing flexibility in strategic decision-making, which has bolstered the longevity and resilience of firms (Etro, 2011; Wang and McElheran, 2017). However, its footprint remains unmeasured. In the current paper, the author offers perhaps the first estimate on the aggregate contribution of the cloud economy for the United States. Adapting a methodology utilized by Siwek (2015) for an estimation on the size of the U.S. internet sector, the author estimates that cloud computing in 2012 contributed approximately $165 billion (1.04 percent) in value-added to US gross domestic product (GDP) and supported approximately 1.7 million jobs in the United States with 80 percent of that employment residing outside cloud industry in indirect positions. The cloud economy produced $281 billion in gross output and the same amount in direct-effect earnings that year. The author estimates these figures using official data from industry input-output tables from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Based on growth rates from previous years through 2012, the author estimates the cloud economy contributed approximately $214 billion (1.1 percent) to US GDP and 2.15 million jobs in 2017. In approximately just 15 years since 2002, the cloud economy has nearly tripled in size.