Participation in the modern, globalized economy necessarily entails some degree of economy-level specialization in terms of the relative intensities of activities, since all economies – and especially developing ones – are small relative to the global economy. At the same time, it has been...

Since the stalling of the Doha Round – which was designed to be development friendly – the world is awash in mega regionals. Major negotiations currently underway include the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the Trade in Services...

On March 13-14, 2003, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade convened an informal meeting of leading observers of international trade and investment to discuss prospects for the Doha Development Agenda. This paper represents a thematic summary of those discussions, which were...

The digital transformation has deep implications for trade policy. The shift of economic, social and political interaction into online modes has meant a steep increase in the share of international trade conducted through e-commerce or facilitated by digital technologies, made the associated...

The development of new general purpose technologies centred on the nexus of Big Data, machine learning and artificial intelligence is transforming and disrupting established economic structures and markets, creating prospects for massive economic rents that incentivize strategic trade and...

With an increasing share of global commerce taking place in digital form or facilitated by digital platforms, it is becoming increasingly important to update the rules-based framework to accommodate and enable the development of the intangibles-based data-driven economy while reconciling the...

Historically, conflict between states has centered on valuable prizes – assets that generated economic rents: land in the agrarian era, trade routes and ports and resources in the industrial mercantile era, intellectual property in the knowledge-based economy era, and now data in the...

The dawn of a new economic era based on a new essential capital asset and new general purpose technologies provides a unifying framework to make sense of the rupture of the rules-based trading system, the flaring conflicts within states, and the eruption of a trade and technology war between...

In the era of continuous and steadily accelerating technological change that started with the industrial revolution, economies and societies were repeatedly transformed in ways that can be linked to ownership of the essential and scarce factor of production of the day and command of the economic...

Big data, exploited by ever more powerful AI and machine-learning engines that extract previously unattainable information, is being monetized in various ways and is underpinning the market valuation of today's most valuable corporations. This has made data-generated rents the principal bone of...