Today, data is produced at an unprecedented scale and speed. It is copied and transferred at zero cost in real time and has become a basic tool used in every government department. Yet government agencies remain reluctant to share the data they hold with other agencies. This paper looks at why data sharing is important, how it can be achieved, the opportunities of big data for the public sector, the main barriers to adoption, and policy conclusions for further work.
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Robust intellectual property (IP) protection is vital for biopharmaceutical innovation. It provides the incentives and business certainty needed to attract and sustain long-term investment in prevention, treatments and cures. IP rights have little value without enforcement, however.
Restrictive rules holding back innovation in the financial sector should be updated to bolster Canada’s productivity. The authors examine the contribution of the financial services sector to Canada’s productivity growth and find it has been underwhelming, considering its potential. The financial services sector employs relatively more Canadians with postsecondary and postgraduate education than do other sectors, and promotes growth and productivity within the other complementary sectors that serve it. As a result, any increase of productivity in the financial sector has an outsized effect on Canada’s productivity at large. The report lays out how regulatory changes could improve the contribution of the financial sector to productivity by increasing competition through the development of fintechs (financial technology), and by bolstering lending to small and medium sized businesses (SMEs), through measures including a switch from a focus on mortgage lending to business lending.
This report serves as an external appraisal of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC)'s Blueprint 2025, which aims to complete the outstanding elements of the original Blueprint and further deepen economic integration. The findings might suggest that the areas in which the AEC is making slow progress are in the areas most important to businesses, most notably in terms of the actions relating to Customs, Trade Facilitation, Standards, Technical Regulations and Conformity Assessment Procedures.
The liberalisation of trade pursued by the European Union (EU) under the European Single Market (ESM) facilitates the development of trade based on market principles where partners mutually profit from trade instead of one gaining and the other losing. This piece looks back at the fifteen years of Polish membership in the European Union to evaluate how the participation in the Single Market is changing the biggest economy to have joined the EU in the 21st century.
China recently moved to ban Canadian canola, soybeans, and other agriproducts. These efforts at economic coercion are closely tied to the ongoing tensions between the two countries, which began when Canadian authorities arrested Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou in December 2018, following a US extradition request. In the long-term, Canada should be taking every measure available to diversify our trade beyond China. Taiwan has been vigilantly doing so for years, and Canadians should take note of its efforts to achieve greater resilience against China’s economic coercion. Such trade diversification should be part of Canada’s long-term strategy in the Indo-Pacific region.
This paper examines the technical and economic feasibility of automation in the Indian garment sector and its likely impact on jobs. Based on secondary data analysis and key informant interviews, the paper argues that though technically robotics can displace 80 per cent labour employed in the Indian garment sector, the actual displacement is going to be much lower as, owing to the economic feasibility, automation is going to be restricted to a few garment production processes only. Paper further argues that despite the automation of the certain production processes, Indian garment sector will register healthy employment growth as expansion in domestic garment demand will be more than sufficient to offset the labour-saving effect of technology.
Economists agree that sustainable economic growth depends on higher-value, knowledge-based services, high-tech manufacturing, research and development, and less reliance on the export of commodities and natural resources. Domestic manufacturing sectors within ASEAN member states, while increasingly diversified, are largely focused on the assembly of products designed and manufactured elsewhere. There is also too much reliance on the export of natural resources. For ASEAN countries to join the ranks of high-income countries, they need to continue to commit and invest in the building of a knowledge economy.