The main objective of this study is to conceptualize “data economy (DE)” and to assess the current state of fostering its ecosystem in three particular service sectors in Korea – finance, real estate, and health care. To that end, we, first, synthesize the key arguments advanced in the recent literature as to the expected socio-economic effects of DE and, second, perform the meta-analyses based on the academic articles of relevancy that are extracted from two international databases: 263,974 articles in the fields of health and medical science from PubMed, established by the National Institute of Health of the U.S.; and, 26,859 articles in the fields of finance and real estate from Web of Science (WOS). Our results are summarized as: for our analytical purpose, DE is defined as an innovation ecosystem in which digital data is collected∙shared∙analyzed∙utilized such that regional or national welfare gain can be realized; Its key elements include DPA(Data∙Platform∙AI)-driven infrastructure along with various enablers, both market-driven and institution-driven; The expected effects of DE, as discussed in the literature, are categorized into three types – (1) the platform effect, (2) the prediction power effect, and (3) the new analytics effect, whose implications to the three sectors are also elaborated; According to the metaanalyses performed, the DE-related academic studies have been growing in an explosive phase in all three sectors since around 2015, and the trend of increasing co-authorship and inter-country collaboration is also observed; And, those articles written by the Korean authors (according to their affiliations) show a fair standing in terms of the quantity, i.e., number of articles (8th place in both databases) but are being lagged significantly compared to other advanced economies in terms of the quality (e.g., average number of citations, newness of research topics). Using the above findings, we discuss the policy directions and tasks for activating DE and expanding its social effects in the three sectors examined
