Hello,
while reading my online newspaper I stumbled upon a short news on a serious study of virtual economy impact on real economy, released under the patronage of the World Bank.
I am quite surprised by the credibility of this (World Bank people are not Sunday hobby economists i guess) and at first look the study seems interesting.
The study is free to download there :
http://www.infodev.org/en/Publication.1056.html
Mmmm may be moved to Culture Recess?
I agree, really interesting paper. I was discussing it the other day with my old corpmates (they still play MMO's, just not EVE). There I wrote:
This sort of thing mostly stopped surprising me several years ago but it's still a little bizarre to see a couple of serious researchers produce "Knowledge Map of the Virtual Economy: Converting the Virtual Economy into Development Potential" with chapter titles such as "Negative externalities from trade of artificially scarce assets" and a thesis that, at first glance, suggests activities like gold farming have a promising future as an economic driver for developing countries.
The way-TL;DR version: "Gaming services" a.k.a. gold farming and power levelling is a $3B industry. In terms of impact on the local economy where the work is done, it is on the same order as the coffee industry (!). It has some nice side effects like promoting development of IT infrastructure, but because it "creates value for the customer by overcoming artificial scarcities" (emphasis mine), the "net social value can sometimes be negative." If donors or NGO's want to promote this industry to enhance its development impact, they "should focus on segments based on natural instead of artificial scarcities in order to ensure that their net social contribution is positive," such as legitimate microwork helping companies like Amazon do simple tasks that still require a human brain.
...
I wish I could find some clarification in the text on exactly what games the 2nd row of table 2 is referring to, though. There is an allusion to this model being common in games based in Asia.