From Digital Trade Wars to Governance Solutions: The G20 and the Digitally-Enabled Economy

Abstract

The progressive shift of economic activity into the digital realm, including through digital and digitally-enabled trade, poses not only a wide range of conceptual issues which require discussion to support a shared understanding of risks and benefits, but promises to create perhaps unprecedented incentives for strategic trade and investment policies, which in turn drive already escalating frictions within the trading system. The G20 brings together the main protagonists in this unfolding drama and so can help by maintaining a constructive dialogue and brokering cooperative solutions. Key areas for engagement include: building a shared understanding of the role of data and its governance; measuring the digital economy and the value proposition in digital economy chapters in trade agreements; sharpening the disciplines on strategic trade and investment behaviour in the data-driven economy while accommodating the flow of technology to developing economies; brokering mutual accommodation of policy measures to ease the many fold transitions necessitated by the digital transformation; and building towards a consensus on systemic issues such as competition policy, the regulation of digital platforms, and industrial policy in an age of accelerated change and heightened business uncertainty.

Keywords: G20, Data, Data-Driven Economy, Digital Governance, Digital Transformation, Strategic Trade Policy, Investment Policy

JEL Classification: F13, L52, O25