KUALA LUMPUR (July 5): Certain government agencies have tenuous relationships with data, with e-commerce being the latest front in the broad economic data ecosystem.

There are major historical e-commerce data gaps and disputed numbers, many of which persist today.

Checks by DigitalEdge indicate Malaysia's e-commerce system dates back to 1998. Meanwhile, the earliest discernible attempts at capturing e-commerce data at the government level began at some point between 2010 and 2015, with the Department of Statistics Malaysia's economic census.

This left a roughly 10-year period (approximately 1998 to 2008) with no e-commerce data being captured at the federal level.

As the private economy becomes more digital and cloud-based, there are stark opportunity costs to "missing the boat" on key trends that reliable e-commerce trade data might have otherwise unearthed.

According to Dr Yeah Kim Leng, professor of economics at Sunway University Business School, there needs to be a more robust e-commerce data ecosystem to add visibility to those parts of the private economy worth focusing on and adding value to.

"We could have used business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce trade data to help identify and capture opportunities in emerging industries that in recent years, seem to have passed us by."

Read more about it in The Edge Malaysia weekly’s July 5 edition.

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