When they say something like “apparel is a $2 trillion industry,” how do they come up with that number? What data is used, how is it gathered and calculated?
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It depends on the industry, but there are firms that do industry studies all the time and then they just sell access to those reports to people who need it, like analysts, financial journalists and stuff, as a student you could often get some of those reports for free through your school.
In some cases the studies will be commissioned directly by some interested party.
In terms of method, again depends on industry, if its an industry with only a few major players they’re look at the number of like the top 5 suppliers and then extrapolate the rest.
If it’s a broader or less defined industry they’ll look at something like the demand side, average amount purchased in a population and then extrapolate outwards.
For something like ‘apparel’ which is incredibly large they’re probably adding up GDP segment data from many countries.
A lot of that stuff is very, very approximate.
There’s a whole field of study known as econometrics which is focused on collecting large scale economic data like that when you can’t possibly know a real answer. Like total GDP or Unemployment numbers or something.
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