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 traced to ownership of the essential and scarce factor of production of the day and command of the economic...

This policy brief tries to work out some of the implications for the Global South of the emergence of Industry 4.0 and the evolution toward a data-driven economy. The digital transformation provides developing economies new opportunities to leapfrog industrial age infrastructure, to draw on the...

The WTO as we know it – version 1.0 – was created for an industrial economy with an overlay of a knowledge-based economy that is now being transformed into a data-driven economy. The content of WTO rules for this new digital economy promises to be very different what is in place now. Not...

The knowledge-based and data-driven economy represents a new stage in the evolution of the economy, with transformative impacts on how goods and services are developed, produced, traded across borders, distributed, and consumed. Data is the essential capital of this new economic age as it...

This note considers the nature of the cybersecurity concerns that have been raised in the decoupling debate and their implications for national security, contrasts those with the nature of the national security concerns that have traditionally been included in the rules-based trade framework,...

This brief examines the framing of the proposed reforms to the Investment Canada Act in the context of the digital transformation and the evolving nature of the contemporary innovation-intensive economy. It argues that the Act must go beyond considerations of the size of firms in triggering...

In the late 2000s, a set of connected technological developments – introduction of the iPhone, deep learning through stacked neural nets, and application of GPUs to neural nets – resulted in the generation of truly astronomical amounts of data and provided the tools to exploit it. As the...