The digital economy accounts for 25 percent of global GDP today and as much as 50 percent of value creation going forward. To maximize the digital economy’s potential, policymakers must adopt effective rules and norms to facilitate trade in digital goods and enable the free flow of data, as GTIPA-member reports in this category explore.
Exploring the development-technology nexus via a digital transformation paradigm shift in development strategy in the digital age.
By helping to create ‘National Single Window’ (NSW) systems for countries around the world, Jonathan Koh has been enabling greater trade for decades. Part the Hinrich Foundation's 'Future of Trade' series, we recently interviewed Koh to discuss the progress of NSWs and the prospects of digital trade agreements such as the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement (DEPA) between Chile, New Zealand, and Singapore.
The paradoxical characterization of India's data governance framework is hard to miss. As the country aspires to become a leading global tech hub, its inward-looking approach for regulating data could be counterproductive from a geopolitical perspective and weaken India's booming digital services industry.
There is evidence that the South Asia's post-pandemic adoption to digital life will shape its future prosperity.
In this edition of The Policy Prism, we explain the diverging transatlantic approach to China. In D.C., we explore infrastructure and making the bipartisan bill a potential soon-to-be reality. In Strasbourg, the ways in which AI have been regulated are highlighted. And finally, is the French language making a comeback to EU institutions and is Biden truly the new FDR?
The vision of data control, or restricting cross-border data flows, as a means of protecting personal data is disruptive and inaccurate. Whether held by the public or private sector, societies benefit the most when large inventories of data are used, shared, and crossed with other sets of data.
Even before the ink was dry on the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement (DEPA), signed between Chile, New Zealand, and Singapore, other countries including the US expressed interest in following suit. Understand the much-discussed DEPA, and its goal to realize the full potential of digital trade for businesses while also safeguarding policy space for governments.
Data-localization policies are spreading rapidly around the world. This measurably reduces trade, slows productivity, and increases prices for affected industries. Like-minded nations must work together to stem the tide and build an open, rules-based, and innovative digital economy.
The theme of this focus is the phenomenon of "black boxes", partly due to the popular "feedback system" that many digital platforms use to collect data on user satisfaction with the goods or services rendered: given that an algorithm, to certain elementary conditions, it is an intellectual work, the claim to know its precise functioning can be frustrated by the refusal of the company that owns the algorithm to make some parts of it public. Under these conditions, various labor law principles appear inapplicable and obsolete.
The rise of the digital economy has complicated the traditional tax environment. The burden of managing such complexity will be substantial for the smallest firms who lack capacity and resources to compete on an international level. Absence of a global cooperation on the range of tax issues could weigh down the promise of the digital economy.