Second-hand goods give economy a nice boost: report
Posted March 2, 2016 8:18 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – One person’s trash can be another person’s treasure — and that attitude is apparently brightening up our country’s economic picture.
A new report from Kijiji and university researchers looked at the impact of the “second-hand economy.”
“The second-hand economy as we studied it in this survey was that we were looking at the acquisition and disposition of used goods. And so, this is about not only buying and selling but also borrowing, donating, swapping. It runs the gamut, and we looked across a lot of different platforms. It includes online platforms like Kijiji but also your traditional bricks and mortar stores as well,” explains Lindsay Tedds, an associate professor of economics at the University of Victoria.
You’re contributing to the $36 billion that second-hand goods add to the country’s GDP.
Buying or exchanging used goods means about $28 billion of economic activity, says Tedds.
“The majority of transactions in the second-hand economy were actually not crowding out the purchase of new goods. So, this represents economic activity that wouldn’t occur otherwise. And then the savings that people are accruing by doing this and the earnings by selling used goods — they’re then using that to go out and bolster their purchases of new goods. It doesn’t crowd out the economy and it even bolsters GDP.”
She adds the average number of items that end up being given a second life is highest in the the western provinces.
Tedds says more than two thirds of people in the country have bought or sold second-hand products.
