This paper addresses the regulatory and policy environments conducive for e-commerce to thrive. In particular, as regulatory issues affecting e-commerce have become more prominent in recent regional trade agreements (RTAs), the paper seeks to investigate their role in setting the regulatory...

Digital trade facilitation refers to the application of modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) to simplify and automate international trade procedures. It is rapidly becoming essential to maintaining trade competitiveness and enabling effective participation in cross-border...

The Internet greatly increases firms' potential to produce new goods and service for new markets. The Internet is also having a dramatic impact on services, especially in the retail, trade and finance sectors, by enabling firms to digitize their products and deliver them over long distances....

National debates over policies that affect the flow of digital information are heating up as censorship, surveillance, control over personal data, and requirements to store data locally have emerged as contentious political issues. In the coming years, governments will need to carefully craft...

This paper reviews the different types of provisions explicitly addressing electronic commerce (e-commerce) in regional trade agreements (RTAs). The analysis covers the 275 RTAs currently in force and notified to the WTO as of May 2017. The analysis shows that e-commerce provisions have become...

This paper explores the definition, measurement, and policy implications of digital trade, proposing a tentative typology of digital trade that can be used to unpack transactions and analyse the issues. Digitalisation is changing what and how we trade: from digital delivery to greater physical...

In theory, e-commerce marketplaces connect buyers and sellers, open trade opportunities, and reduce transaction costs thereby creating opportunities for more inclusive trade and even GVC participation, especially for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). Further, there is some...

Recent technological changes have altered the way in which interactions take place between economic agents. One of the main advances is the possibility to broadly disseminate information at very low cost. E-commerce is a significant part of this change, becoming increasingly important within the...

This paper explores how regulatory responses to emerging IP issues in digital trade may develop at the international level and in particular how existing mechanisms might influence the chances of developing internationally agreed rules in this regard. The primacy of state sovereignty in...

This paper presents an innovative database of domestic and bilateral online services trade between 39 countries, including the US, the EU and some emerging market economies. It combines monetized and "free" online services in a single measure based on the volume of page views on websites of...