The emergence of the data-driven economy has profound implications for the role for the state as economic agent, as regulator, and as the agent of power projection internationally to capture global rents. We focus on the role of data as a capital asset, compare the characteristics of data in...

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...

The gains of a country from participating in global value chains (GVCs) will depend on the productive activities taking place in its jurisdiction and their linkages to the domestic economy. Lead firms' decision on where to locate and how to coordinate production activities is influenced, among...

Singapore is now one of the leading financial centres in the world, although the city-state started as a Third World country when independence was imposed on it in 1965. Although some natural conditions such as geographic location which possessed by other international financial centres are also...

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...

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...

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...

The United States championed the creation of new rules for the digital economy in TPP. Analyzing this effort as “digital megaregulation” foregrounds aspects that the conventional “digital trade” framing tends to conceal. On both accounts, TPP’s most consequential rules for the digital...

This paper explores the development of public sector capabilities for Productive Development Policies in Costa Rica through four case studies of successful experiences, with less successful cases presented as counterfactuals. To some extent the paper tests the Technical, Organizational and...

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...