This paper studies the welfare consequences of a government regulation that forces a patented equipment to be supplied by a number of independent producers. On the one hand, such a regulation hurts the value of a patent and therefore reduces activities in the R&D sector. On the other hand, the...

We study e-commerce across 47 economies and 26 industries during the COVID-19 pandemic using aggregated and anonymized transaction-level data from Mastercard, scaled to represent total consumer spending. The share of online transactions in total consumption increased more in economies with...

The use of e-commerce around the world has accelerated in recent years, with Asia, led by China, spearheading the rise. Using cross-country enterprise survey data, this paper shows that firms engaged in e-commerce have higher productivity and generate a larger share of their revenues from...

We find that data transparency policy reforms, reflected in subscriptions to the IMF's Data Standards Initiatives (SDDS and GDDS), reduce the spreads of emerging market sovereign bonds. To overcome endogeneity issues regarding a country's decision to adopt such reforms, we first show that the...

How can governments reduce the prevalence of cross-border tax fraud? This paper argues that the use of digital technologies offers an opportunity to reduce fraud and increase government revenue. Using data on intra-EU and world trade transactions, we present evidence that (i) cross-border trade...

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift toward digital services. Meanwhile, the race for technological and economic leadership has heated up, with risks of decoupling that could set back trade and growth and hinder the recovery from the worst global recession since the Great Depression....

The ever-increasing digitalization of businesses has accelerated the need to address the many shortcomings and unresolved issues within the international corporate income tax system. In particular, the customer or 'user'-through their online activities-is now considered by many as being a...

Access to financial services in the small states of the Pacific is being eroded. Weaknesses in Anti-Money Laundering and Combating the Financing of Terrorism compliance in the context of high levels of remittances are contributing to banks' decisions to withdraw corresponding banking...

China's digital economy has expanded rapidly in recent years. While average digitalization of the economy remains lower than in advanced economies, digitalization is already high in certain regions and sectors, in particular e-commerce and fintech, and costal regions. Such transformation has...

This paper examines the extent to which digitalization-measured by a new proxy based on IP addresses allocations per country-has influenced inflation dynamics in a sample of 36 advanced and emerging economies over 2000-2017. Phillips curve estimates show that digitalization has a statistically...