The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF virtual intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> WILLIAM DRAKE: I see that people are joining. Can everybody hear
me okay? Good. Thanks.
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: The hour has reached 1500. Which is our starting
time. Central European time. We are in particular waiting for a
couple of panelists I think. Okay. I think everybody is a panelist
here now. That's...that's a good start.
>> Hello.
>> Just one minute and we'll get everything sorted out here.
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: Okay. Martine, just tell me whenever you would
like me to begin. Since you're there.
A few PowerPoints from the other panelists that have to be loaded.
IGF.
Mapping and measuring digital trade integration.
1500.
Room 6.
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: I was saying the IGF is starting to name -- we
have the last session of the last day. So thanks for coming. They
saved the best for last, of course.
(Video opening).
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: I've been involved in the IGF since before the
beginning and that's the first time I've ever started the session with
a commercial. So interesting experience.
It is now almost five minutes after. Means we have 55 minutes left.
Shall I begin, Martine?
>> MARTINA FERRACANE: Sure.
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: Okay. Hello everybody, the few of the bold people
who have joined us. I see ten people in the room. And hopefully there
will be more later. We'll see how that goes.
I am William Drake from Columbia University, formerly University of
Zurich. And here in Geneva, as you can see behind me.
This is a hybrid one hour session. Some of us are in Poland, as you
see Martina; and others of us are in our pajamas, no names will be
mentioned. Thanks to Martina for organising.
As indicated in the session description, this session engages with
policy questions central to the governance of global digital trade and
data flows over the Internet. Hence issues that are central to
Internet governance. As digital trade has grown massively in recent
years, governments around the world are working to put in place
national approaches and parallel engaging international regime
negotiations in a variety of bilateral, regional, plural lateral
free-trade agreements, as well as in the free trade organization.
And as always happens when new trade processes and issues arise, some
governments and stakeholders have sought to shield their markets from
international competition through a variety of restrictive measures,
while others have deprived these things as being contrary to the spirit
and letter of international trade agreements.
Major barrier to reconciling divisions of view in this realm has
always been the lack of comprehensive and updated analyses and
indicators regarding such policies and practices that restrict trade.
That can be meaningfully compared across jurisdictions to gather macro
level view of the state of play, flows of digital products and services
as the global digital economy, and time and et cetera. And absent such
analyses and indicators, governments and stakeholders may misconstrue
their national capabilities and interests, trade negotiators may face
great uncertainty as to how to bargain and problem solve, and
collective governance efforts may be impeded.
So if we look at the history of international cooperation, it's been
well demonstrated that under conditions of complexity and uncertainty,
new ideas and information have often proved to be causal and indeed
essential to helping to clarify actors' thinking and interests and to
map paths forward.
In this connection the expertise, credibility, and independence of
actors advancing new ideas and information have been key to the
reception of their messages. So we've seen this over the years in
fields that intersect to the digital trade of today, whether it's trade
and services, Internet governance, or data flows. And today we see
that a number of industry associations, international organizations,
research institutes, think tanks, analysts, and governments and others
have been assembling analyses and indicators on policies affecting the
digital economy and analyzing their effects.
However, to date, as I say, there's been inadequate coordination of
structured comparison of the evidence between these efforts. So this
session seeks to advance that process of coordination, kind of building
the epistemic community of people who are involved in the field of
digital trade and our collective knowledge base in order to try to
facilitate more effective international cooperation around digital
trade issues.
Today we're going to talk about four initiatives in particular: The
Digital Policy Alert from the University of Saint Gallen Endowment for
Prosperity for Trade; the Regional Digital Trade Restrictiveness Index
of the UN ESCAP; the Digital Trade Policy Project in Africa by the
UNECA; and Digital Trade Integration Project by the European University
Institute (?) School and London School of Economics and Vochomny (?)
University.
These initiatives all provide open access data which can prove to be
valuable tools for researchers and policy makers, practitioners,
et cetera, in shedding light on the regulations as a digital economy,
and trying to identify gaps and possible good practices going forward.
We have four speakers who will talk about the initiatives they're
involved in, and I'll introduce them in the order in which they will be
speaking. And I apologize in advance for any mispronunciations. We'll
have Johannes Fritz, CEO of the St. Gallen Endowment for Prosperity
Through Trade; Witada Anukoonwattaka, Senior Economic Affairs Officer
in Trade Policy and Facilitation Section on Trade, Investment, and
Innovation Division at the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia
and Pacific, and coordinates the regional digital integration project
at UN ESCAP.
Geoffroy Guepie, Associate of Economic Affairs Officer at the United
Nations Economic Commission for Africa, UN-ECA; and Martina Ferracane,
the Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, she manages
the Digital Trade Initiative along with professor Bernard Hoekman.
Martina also will be serving as the online monitor today, replacing
Anna Abronova (?), who unfortunately was unable to be with us.
And we have as a Rapporteur, Allen P. Alex. Each of the speakers
will talk for a little under eight minutes each in order to leave room
at the end for open discussion among all participants. And so we're
hoping that, despite having a small last day crowd, that we can have a
vibrant and interesting discussion around the issues of how do we
gather and share and compare knowledge and information, data about
trade practices that impact the extent and character of trade
integration around the world, and that impact the ability of
governments and other stakeholders to reach agreements on the
governance of digital trade.
So I think this is an important topic, and I hope that we'll be able
to hear a lot of different views expressed about it.
That's the game plan. So we'll go through the four presentations,
and we'll have open discussion among all participants. And when we do
that of course we ask that everybody identify themselves clearly and
stick to one or two minutes in their interventions so that everybody
can speak..
Okay. So that's the setup. And now we begin. Johannes, you are
first up. Would you like to tell us about your initiative?
>> JOHANNES FRITZ: So hello, fellow participants and contributors.
I come to you from the snowy Alps. My name is Johannes; I represent
the St. Gallen Endowment, which is a Swiss charitable nonprofit that
seeks to promote transparency in international policy choice and
democratize access to such data around the world.
We are best known for our oldest initiative, which is the Global
Trade Alert running for 12 years, and collected over 40,000 pieces of
information based on official sources that people can dip into on a
public database. And earlier this year we launched a new initiative,
which I'm an excited to speak to you about today, which is a Digital
Policy Alert.
And we formulated a Digital Policy Alert based on two worries -- two
observations and one worry. We observe that there's lots of activity
in the digital space about regulating and policy making that affects
the digital economy, and at the same time we observe that there is no
public accessible inventory that is timely created and tracks all this
activity.
And based on those two observations, we worry that there is a risk of
fragmenting the Internet, stories like Chinese shipping data not
getting out across the world, and people don't know where their goods
are, similar issues around the GDPR, where merchants are worried to
contract with Europeans because they might become liable over here,
overseas.
Such stories tell us about broader risks that businesses worry about,
compliance costs for entry in the market. And the flipside of it is
that consumers worldwide, particularly in small markets and less
purchasing power markets may lose out on the benefits that the Internet
promises for us all for as an air for exchanging ideas in commerce.
So what we brought to help mitigate this list, what we as the digital
policy institute are trying to do, bring in a data set that is timely
and create a public inventory for everybody to use and bring it out in
two distinct data products. The first one we call we launched in April
is an activity tracker we want to allow stakeholders to engage early so
you don't need your own policy department to make your voice heard.
That you can see what's going on in digital space, that you can act on
and get your voice heard before a law is passed, before a regulation is
finally adopted.
As early as we can get it to you, we'll make it available to you and
get you a notification if you're so inclined. And the second data
product is more going into detail, we call it a detailed mapping, which
is about making -- dissecting laws into the relevant details,
dissecting orders into what the main differences are. So our uses can
freely compare such laws across time and across space, figuring out
really where choice differs across the planet. What -- how these
difference play out in the real world and what they may or may not want
to do about it. So we've been running with the activity trackers
and -- April this year for a couple of months now and we have some
findings that I want to share with you today.
We have currently tracked around 1,000 such policy or regulatory
changes for 20020 at the European member states at Switzerland for now.
This is our launch data set. And if you look at the -- just the 700
activities that we track for this year alone, 700 policy changes that
were proposed or implemented this year this these countries we see lots
of activity in the big trading blocks, United States and Europe. Buff
also elsewhere. There's a big difference between the centre and
centralized action. In Europe the European commission works on data
governance and also on probably heard the regulation of artificial
intelligence, what algorithms may or may not do and under what
circumstances.
On the decentralist level on member states we see issues around
content moderation but also taxation of the digital services, also
e-commerce they become more active here in Europe. In the United
States also is more worried about data governance but competition,
competition areas as we'll see on our next slide. Also really big
centre of activity. And the states, the different states in the
United States do also start moving on a tax front and privacy
protection is also not a federal issue with the United States, but also
more of a decentralized state level issue.
The United States and U.S. -- and EU, not the only actors we have.
There's lots going on in China, in Canada. Where we have issues around
ambitious content moderation law in Canada. We see the bargaining
power between small and large media actors negotiated in Australia.
And other really state and developments mostly around competition, data
governance and the like. And if I break this up I talk about these
different policy fields which we all try to capture as a Digital Policy
Alert. We try to take the most comprehensive view possible going from
data governance regulation, content moderation, taxation. But also
like foreign direct investment or any service access and operation
requirements. We try to get them in.
And if I break this up by these broad areas, what we'll see for 2021
is that we have really five blocks that are highly active. The data
governance, competition, content, operational issues. Taxation. And
data governance takes the cake by far. Where we see the most activity.
Fortunately also where coordination is on the way. Although not far
enough.
As you probably have heard we tried to get multi lateral cooperation
on the economy issues at WTO, the World Trade Organization and
so-called joint statement initiative where they tried to formulate a
common text that the governments around the world can agree to on what
they want to do with regulating the transfer of data, say. But there's
much to do and a lot of national of level action that is currently
outside of the scope of that initiative. Another thing that we find
very interesting as the Digital Policy Alert references, is
competition. Not much of a development issue per se but raises very
important, dicey questions like for instance who is upon for enforcing
competition in global economy?
If there is Facebook, merges with Gifi, two American companies but
now European regulators want it to intervene and say they also affect
our markets here. Something you had classically in competition law
which was much about where the companies are located no longer applies.
It's also kind of hard to say when do we get in as regulators about
competition?
Because usually we are as regulators all about consumer you surplus,
that the consumers are not ripped off which is very hard as a concept
to work in much of the digital economy. And so they have to think
about how really -- where to start as a competition and enforcement
agency and where to stop. We also see like content moderation where
they all issue -- issue of harmful speech, this gray area between
illegal speech and free speech, harmful speech.
Where does the discussion begin that reminds us of very much of
broadcasting legislation, where what you see on television varies
greatly on different countries and continents. And similar we see the
different national takes on what is permissible content and what isn't.
And finally, an interesting area for us is also taxation where you
probably have heard of the OACD's attempt to get global minimum
corporate income tax. This is highly related to the digital economy.
There are a bunch of countries around the world that have already
proposed a so-called digital service tax, a tax on any Internet
provided service. That you provide in a country, like if you sell a
stream of product to a Canadian, that the Canadian government would
take tax you for that.
There are a bunch of those that are implemented but not enforced.
They hinge on the promise by the OECD accord that governments will pull
in a global minimum tax in 2023. And so until we have that, there's an
extent on such digital service taxes and at least in Europe and in
Canada. So we'll see how that plays out because it will be an
important part of how we regulate the digital economy.
What I want to impress you is we -- as was said, finding interesting.
There's much to come and I would be grateful if you keep engaging with
us. You can get to me at the digital policy org website. Stay tuned
for our first version coming in first quarter and report coming out in
the second part of the year. Here's my address and I look forward to
your many comments and discussion now. I give it back to you, William.
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: Perfect. Right on time. Excellent and very
interesting. Let's go to Witada. Are you there and ready to go?
>> WITADA ANUKOONWATTAKA: Yes, Bill.
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: Hi.
>> WITADA ANUKOONWATTAKA: Hi. Thank you very much. I hope you can
see my screen.
Thank you. I'm Witada Anukoonwattaka from Trade, Investment, and
Innovation Division of ESCAP.
What I would like to show you today is one of our initiatives that
we're looking at digital economy integration for Asia Pacific Region.
And we work in collaboration with the European University in Stewart as
well as OECD, to take and collect data for building tools to support
policy-makers.
What the collaborations here that we have with the OECD, and European
University is actually lead us to -- to have background information
that feed into a bigger -- bigger tools. We call it digital
and sustainable region integration index. Which is an index capturing
governments of Asia Pacific Region in the regional integration. Not
only digital economy, but actually there are different dimensions that
we are looking into it: Trade, investment, finance, digital policy,
infrastructure, movement of people, corporations, and of course the
important one especially for the 21st Century is the digital
integrations.
In our industry framework here, when we are looking at digital
integration, we have -- we try to address not only the performance of
countries in Asia Pacific Regions in terms of standard way of
integrations, but we try to also address sustainable development
perspective. So you could see in our framework that there is
conventional integration part, and sustainable integration part. And
these two parts have indicators within it that use in complementary to
each other, to reflect both efficiency and sustainability of how the
region perform.
Talking specifically into this start economy integration is where our
initiative on digital trade (?) -- restrictiveness measurements is to
begin. Because through the assumptions that openness and harmonization
of digital trade trends in the regions would allow interabilities and
pave the way for better original research integrations. We conduct
data collection in collaboration with our partners at IN(?) And we
establish the RDTII index. And we use that index information -- as one
of the informations that feed into industry.
And this is the framework on this start, economic integration. To
put things simply, we put our measurements under these domains into
four clusters: Trade and regulation is where the IDTI original Digital
Trade index is for thinking. Apart from this reportery indicators, the
cluster also looks into how digital goods and service trade flows in
the regions are performed.
How tariff is changed on these products. And how progress the region
makes in e-commerce penetrations. So all of these subdomains is good
thing together and give us information to talk about governments of the
regions in terms of trade and regulatory integrations.
Apart from this domain, the registry also captures performance in
infrastructure connectivities that are relevant to digital trade. Not
only for sectors like ICT, but also soft sector like finance
infrastructure. These two clusters is what we call conventional
measurements. When I was saying we also taking care of sustainability
of the integration and that is reflected in the second part of this
framework, which is the inclusive part. And security part.
Talking about inclusiveness, we try to proxy them, it's not perfect.
But we try to capture inclusive access to core sector like Internet,
finance, structures and inclusive of e-commerce penetration. When
we're looking to not only the populations, percentage of population
access to Internet, but looking to how proportionate it is when
compared between majority and minority groups of people.
So cyber security, the proxy that we use right now is -- this is
still the ongoing initiative. So we ask the revising indicators when
we file -- this is the preliminary one. The cyber security now we use
secure Internet server as one of the proxies there.
Just to give you a snapshot of what we found: The regions based on
these two measurements, as you may expect, Asia Pacific is very
diverse. We have very advanced countries and very small and low income
countries. So diverse performance is what you would expect. But more
interesting is also when we compare conventional index with sustainable
index, many countries have much more modest performance in terms of
sustainability of the integrations. And often these developed
countries are landlocked and left behind. Not only in terms of
infrastructures, but also in terms of regulations that they apply.
There are two groups of them for these poor, low income country. One
groups go into overly -- (?) And the other group go into not
sufficiently (?)
So both of them -- both groups sitting in two different ends of the
spectrum when it comes to restrictiveness.
They also have this advantage in terms of distance and other things
that make them difficult to participate in digital goods value chains.
And not be able to attract FDI, which supposed to bring them capital
that they lack, or technology that they lack, and lead to the higher
global development. And this gap is -- is locked in digital domain
when compared to other regional integration measurements.
If you remember, we have seven (?). So when compared to trade,
investment, or other areas of (?), digital economy integration, the
gaps between these large and small countries become more significant.
So having said that, I still encourage you to look more into the
publications, I keep in my first slide, to the registry, to see more
in-depth on what we do there and how we can use the information from
industry with -- you can dig deeper into similarity of Asia Pacific
Regions. And we have the data sets available. And we are actually
upgraded to the second version which we expect to release early next
year.
And more analysis on what we found in this too will come along. One
of that is the Asia Pacific digital trade, the regulatory part that we
will be launching in a month or so.
And for ESCAP, our priority is three things. First we establish
evidence which not only ESCAP and (?), the initiative in OECD, in
youth, and what you do here in this workshops also provide evidence.
But using this evidence, we use it to build capacity for
policy-makers. To support their reform of the policy. So the
framework that we develop will be fed into our training materials hour
capacity building workshop and technical assistance that we engage with
countries in Asia Pacific. It uses also to support their negotiations,
capacities, we establish that from like trade negotiation advisors that
the gaps between research, evidence that we collect, and our partner
collects and use them to become the stools for advising where is the
weak point of policy across different areas. And compare it with their
concerned parties when they have to go to negotiation tables or so they
know where they are and where their peers are.
So that's all for the ESCAP initiatives that I would like to
introduce for you today. Thank you very much.
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: Thank you very much, Witada. That was very
interesting.
May I ask just because this is a short session and we want to make
sure that we have enough time for open discussion that the other
panelists keep an eye on the chat. And I will let you know when you
reach the eight-minute mark, at which point it would be good to start
to wind down.
Okay. So let's turn next to Geoffroy. Geoffroy, are you there?
>> GEOFFROY GUEPIE: Yes. Many thanks. I will try to be short.
But let me share my screen.
Okay. I think -- is it shared?
>> Yes.
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: It's good.
>> GEOFFROY GUEPIE: I'm Geoffroy Guepie, work for Economic
Commission for Africa, United Economic Commission for Africa and work
in our digital trade initiative.
Just to say that of course during the importance that digital trade
is gaining in the world, but also the challenges associated with its --
its measurements, our commission launched the same way as ESCAP, a
digital trade laboratory integration initiative toward the end of 2020.
This (?) of the main objective of assessing the readiness of African
country to effectively engage in digital trade and e-commerce.
And this incentive comes at a time when preferred (?) of negotiation,
of AFCT, I mean African Continental Free Trade Area. So it's come at
the (?) of the AFCTA, for using on e-commerce. And it is very
important as we want to also participate in this negotiation and give
some education, give some policy recommendation to negotiators.
In corporate incentive begin with a training component. And training
and research compliance are given the tools to collect and compile the
digital trade. The data is collected, developed at a national level to
inform sue separate -- the first one is digital service trade
restriction, and the second one is digital trade integration. I want
to just mention that digital trade service, we work together with OECD,
and digital trade integration we work together with European Union
University and closely with Martina, who is there.
So therefore -- and the information collected through this initiative
may have multi use. The first one, which is very important for us, is
to assisting member states on digital trade issue at large and
e-commerce, particularly in the context of the AFCTA negotiation.
The second one also interesting is to expand the coverage of Africa
country in OECD digital service trader or restrictiveness. Before
initiative, the only African country which was covered was South
Africa. So now we want to expand it to the 28 countries that we are --
that we are analyzing during this initiative.
The third users will be to build a digital trade integration index
for Africa. Because we have already an integration which -- an
index -- sorry -- which measure original to the integration in Africa,
and to have the world picture of regional integration we want to add
with this incentive, we want to add a digital component to this index
also.
And of course data will be publicly available for anyone interested
to make analysis on digital trade and data will be publicly available
through a dedicated platform.
So now let's focus on the two database that we collect and also share
with you the key finding that we have from now.
So the first one is the data related to digital service trade
restriction. So the information collected was used to construct an
index of restrictiveness of trade in digital services for each country
that we cover. And in the graph you will see the -- some of the
countries that we covered because the initiative is still ongoing and
we have not all the 28 countries that we cover.
So this is a sample that we have for now.
And the result is instead very interesting. The main result, the
first result striking first we said that is highlighted with this graph
is that most of the African countries have reduced restrictive measures
to digital trade.
Take the example of Uganda, here, from 2014 to now how the variation
is very -- is very big. If you compare Uganda to Zambia, for example,
you see that there was at the same level in 2014 and now we see the --
you can appreciate very well the variation in Uganda and in most of the
country in our sample. So one interesting result is that main
restriction to across African country formed infrastructure, and this
infrastructure pillars we each compare data protection and also
infrastructure requirement where we are interconnection between
Internet and -- (?)
Also interesting to note in the first result is that country does
have a high restriction score for intellectual property rights and
electronic transaction are generally not party to international
agreements. And this gives the message that -- indicate that --
sorry -- regulation should ensure balanced protection of intellectual
property and property rights order.
So the fact to ratify international agreement with ensure balanced
protection with the partner of intellectual property rights local or
come from abroad.
And now let's turn on the results from the digital integration data
that we collect. And concerning this preliminary results show that
African countries are relatively integrated in the digital trade.
Law and legislation do not discriminate between digital trade
relevant sectors and other sectors. You can take the example of FDI,
for example. In all countries that we analyzed, we see that in digital
trade we live in sector, whether in digital trade within sector or not,
FDI is subject to the same criteria.
Parts of second result which is interesting is that many countries
evade lack legislating (?) from work in core digital area like data
protection, cross (?) transfer, and consumer protection law. Here so
you can -- the example, in Zimbabwe, Tanzania, do not have a
legislative or -- work for data protection. If you take, for example,
Tanzania, they have not a consumer protection law. And many countries
that we cover have not, you know, some consumer protection law. There
are many laws related to digital trade.
And also further what's interesting about the digital trade
transaction, which is a high (?) in some country. So let us conclude
that it is important to have a anonymized rule and regulation across
Africa, especially when it comes to cross-border transfer data.
Also we can see that after this analysis, that the emergence of a
climate of trust is very important. And also here consumer protection
regulation could help to increase this confidence in terms of digital
trade environment in Africa.
And of course many other big issues need to be clarified and in terms
of regulation, IPO, good and services sector, which are important for
economics, also need to have a look.
So I will end here and say that the analysis is still ongoing and we
will get more result, of course. Which is very interesting. And it is
highlighted here is data regulation, is -- in Africa needs be -- how
you say, to be looked clearly to open trade in digital services.
Many thanks.
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: Thank you very much. That was very interesting
and good data and evidence from the African case.
Finally we have Martina. Would you like to --
>> MARTINA FERRACANE: Yes. Thanks, Will.
Well, for me it's extremely interesting to see the results of these
studies, because you can really see how diverse countries can be in
different -- in the different regions we have looked at. And this
shows that there is a lot of work to do to clarify also what policies
can be implemented that will be more digitally trade integrated.
Well, on my side I just wanted to start by saying that we are here at
the Internet Governance Forum, UN forum on Internet governance. And I
have heard the word the "trade," very, very few times. And it's
surprising because, when we discuss here platform regulation, data
regulation, content moderation, all issues which are now being
discussed in trade agreements, countries are taking commitment on this
agreements.
But still in this forum there is not enough space and interest in a
topic which is affecting greatly Internet governance.
But wait, starting from this introduction, I move to the presentation
of our project, which connects a bit the project we heard before in
different ways. And this is a project which we have launched in July,
at the European University Institute, which aims to map digital trade
policies and create an index.
So before presenting the project, I want to quickly present the other
three initiatives, which are -- which exist at the global level on this
topic. There is the DTRI initiative at (?) which I will present in a
moment. The digital STRI, which is not OICD initiative that we heard
about before, because the UN is now helping to expand the coverage of
this index. And then there is the policy, Digital Policy Alert that we
already heard from -- by Johannes.
So just quickly in terms of what are the results and information we
have on these initiatives.
On one the DTRI, which is an index developed at this site which now
has now been discontinued. So this is also a reason why we are
starting our new initiative. This was the first initiative to try to
map major (?) in digital trade and attempted to create an index. This
was done a few years ago in 2018. And this initiative covered 64
countries; and by creating an open database, which today is still being
used by academics and also international organizations, by having this
database it was possible to create an index.
All the methodologies available online. And this index gave a very
clear picture for the first time on the level of restrictiveness the
countries had on digital trade. And it's -- it was easy to spot China,
Russia, India as the main countries imposing restrictions on digital
trade; while New Zealand, Iceland, Norway, Hong Kong are countries that
were found to be imposing very few restrictions.
And by looking at the map, just in terms of number of measures -- so
without weighting, putting weights on scores -- you can again see
India, China, and by also Germany, France imposing a lot of measures
that have an impact on digital trade. And on the other hand, countries
like Australia, and again New Zealand imposing few restrictions.
The OECD initiative, a more recent, is an expansion of their STRI
index to have a digital pillar.
And it covers less countries, I think it's about 35. But thanks to
UN now they're expanding their scope. So they would provide yet to 60
or so. And these initiative which focuses on services only. And in
particular in four areas. So infrastructure, payments, IT, and here
again they create an index. All the information about the index is
available online. And if we just look at the number of measures that
they find, the picture is very similar to the other initiative from the
site.
Again we find China, India, Russia imposing a lots of measures, but
the EU, they find much more measures in eastern Europe compared to the
previous initiative which found more measures in France and Germany.
This is just to give a picture of what is out there; and of course
then there is the Digital Policy Alert, very recently launched.
Johannes already said everything about it. It is mainly an exercise to
map more measures, but it doesn't have any analysis and trying to
create an index out of those measures; but is a very helpful tool to
find information which in implemented at the global level.
So in practice we have our first initiative, which has been
discontinued. Another initiative which covers only services. And a
third initiative which maps measures.
So we thought that there was a need to do more and to work farther on
measuring the impact of this -- of those policies.
And this is important for different reasons. First of all, we still
need to provide more transparency and understanding on the type of
measures which affect digital trade.
Still there is no commonly agreed taxonomy, there is no commonly
agreement on different measures, more to do on this front and we are
trying also to work on.
Then thanks to the initiatives like this we can create options for
comparison across countries. And can conduct quantitative analysis.
This is the most important point for us as a university and an
institute working on policy because through this date that what we want
to do is then conduct empirical exercises. And I've worked in the past
with the indexes I've presented before on some of those analyses. We
work on data policies specifically.
And using the information of this databases, so we could look at the
-- empirically at how different types of measures impact different
variables. We found that the certain type of cross-border data
policies can and are restrictive services trade. We also found that
domestic data policies can reduce productivity of companies. And in
our most -- the most recent study we did for the war bank, what we did
was to -- starting for the database, dividing countries into three
categories, whether they have open regime on data, whether they have
conditions applied to data flows, and whether they have a controlled
regime, like the China approach.
And we could empirically, then estimate the impact of these regimes
on services. And we found that an open approach provides -- is related
to more trading services. The conditional approach of the EU is
associated with more or less trade depending on the sector we are
looking at, while the approach followed by China for example is always
associated with less trade.
And this is important data if we want to then provide the good advice
to policy-makers.
So quickly presenting what the project is about, we have created a
network of experts across different universities. For now the
universities are London school of economics, the European Institute in
Bako (?) University. We meet often to discuss these issues and to
create a common understanding on these issues. And we are collecting
data on -- to launch an open data set, thanks to the collaboration with
the UN; and already we have heard about this collective efforts before.
And we aim to develop an index through this -- using the data we are
collecting.
The partners of initiative on top of the four universities are ESCAP,
UN ECLAC, Latin America, ECIPE, and the THSA network, which is a
network in Australia and Asia.
Just very quickly showing what is a practical implementation of what
we are doing, we have -- the regional digital third integration index
developed through ESCAP -- I will not go through the methodology, but
just to tell you there is similar measures to be looked at. And with
this index we have already called a map and create a ranking of
countries based on their approach toward digital trade.
We can then look, for example, how each country is doing compared
with the regional average on the different pillars we are looking at,
and then easily spot our -- where a country can improve.
And then we have also looked into similarity across measures, and
this all data and report you will find in the UN. And what we did was
also to start discussing with the policy-makers in certain countries
and with the Philippines, there's a report also out which really used
the data we collected to provide specific policy advices that was then
well taken and implemented with interest.
So I intend to implement it in the Philippines.
To conclude, what we are doing with this project is currently we have
kicked off the data collection, and in November we started webinar
series. With meeting on security. Next week we're having a webinar on
data flows. And more issues will be discussed in open webinars which
are open to everybody.
And we aim to finalize data collection in March. And launch the
index in May. And then start with the first annual report in
September. If you want to know more about in initiative and you want
to know, join the webinars during our initiatives, you can Google our
project on -- and you will also have our QR code to go exact. Thanks.
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: Okay. Excellent. Thank you very much for that,
Martina.
We don't have a lot of time left, but that's okay, I guess. This is
not a workshop with a lot of people banging on the door, champing at
the bit ready to talk. But we do have a few minutes.
Are there any people participating who have not had a chance to speak
thus far, would like to offer a comment, question, provocation? So on?
If so, you can just type something into the chat or otherwise raise
your hand in a way that Martina would notice. We ought to be able to
do that. I assume the hand raising thing works. What do they got --
maybe it does not.
Okay. If there are none, let me ask, then, whether any of the
speakers have any questions that they would like to ask each other by
way of clarification, amplification, so on. That would be of course
interesting as well.
Anyone have any -- we've been Zoombombed. Look at that. How lovely.
That's great.
>> Embarrassing. I think this happened already in other sessions.
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: Really? You know -- it's just really -- people
are so bored. You know? They just really -- get a life.
Anyway...(shouting).
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: Okay. That's charming.
Anyway, be that as it may, are there any comments that any panelists
would like to make to each other?
>> MARTINA FERRACANE: I think we have been hacked. There are
three --
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: Yeah, we certainly have.
>> Hello, guys, how you do?
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: All right.
>> MARTINA FERRACANE: There are still a few people connected.
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: All right. This is a waste of our time. I was --
>> So many people joined towards the end of the session.
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: At least they waited until you all got to speak.
That's the good news.
Kind of pathetic, people are so...whatever. You know, what are you
going to do?
I'm sorry. Let's me just ask the panelists, since nobody has a
question to each other.
I think what you're all doing is very interesting. And obviously
there is a very important case for trying to make -- gather this
information and make it more comparable across cases. And for
networking the different initiatives together as we're starting here by
having this session and what Martina is doing with multiple players
involved as well.
I'm just wondering if people see any path forward from these various
initiatives, in terms of linking them together more to build a
community of expertise and practice that can start to have some
salience politically with the governments, the trade negotiators, but
also with the governments more generally. I mean, how do we go about
institutionalizing cooperation and making it count?
We've seen this happen in the IGF, we've seen successful cases. I've
been involved in, for example, launching global Internet governance
academic network back in 2006. But then we also had an effort to form
a dynamic coalition on digital trade, and it went nowhere. So you
know, things go back and forth.
But I'm just wondering, does anyone see possibilities here for trying
to grow some collaboration and making it more visible?
Anybody have any thoughts?
>> JOHANNES FRITZ: To me I think it's really cool to see. I mean,
Martina has been in this space for a very long time. And now she took
the lessons and said, we need these aggregations that she's doing,
she's doing the research. I think we are 00 for my -- we are trying to
gather data and help with sectionalities. Because right now we capture
data, the analyses that also Geoffroy Witada talked about, creating
indices and making sure where the pressure points are. I think this is
great. It looks really good.
And I hope we can map into it readily, as Martina indicated.
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: That would be great. Yeah.
>> MARTINA FERRACANE: On our side, from UI perspective, we really
see this as the start of an exercise which aims eventually to reach out
to policy-makers and try to create this more open community. And in
our webinars, for example, we are always trying to reach out to people
in different stakeholder groups, inviting them to our discussion so we
can really try to make it multistakeholder.
And I think the collaboration with the UN is very important. Because
they have a unique channel to discuss and talk and present best
practices to policy-makers. And personally I think the experience with
UN ESCAP and the Philippines government has been the most interesting
for me in my professional experience because it was really with dark
channel, thanks to the UN, to provide specific recommendation based on
the study we did to policy-makers that were involved in different
ministries and different areas of the government.
And this is really what the studies eventually dreamed to do. Not
only with one government, but with more. So this is the way to go for
us. And we keep doing empirical analysis to try to then identify best
practices.
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: That's excellent. Thanks a lot for that, Martina.
And yes, you've been a real catalyst here in this field, which has
been really helpful to everybody.
Would anybody else like to add something?
We're running up towards the end. I don't know if IGF intends to
shut it down, the recording in one minute. Any last thoughts from any
of the other speakers? Geoffroy? Witada? Anybody?
>> WITADA ANUKOONWATTAKA: I just want to add from UN perspective,
especially ESCAP, what we are doing with UI, and with other partners.
We are using it to communicate directly with the government. So we run
expert group, we think, we invite government to understand the
frameworks.
And then we have received requests in building the capacity for
analyzing this issue more into the policy decisions. So that's what
would allow us to bring the evidence that we found, also make them
fit directly into their policies.
The Philippines, as I mentioned, are the pilot countries. But I do
believe that going forward there will be more. More for us to reach
them.
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: That would be something to look forward to for
everyone.
All right. Well, I think we are actually a minute over time. So
again, I apologize for the little bit of Zoombombing there. Apparently
that's been going around during this IGF meeting. And what can you do?
Hopefully it will be edited before this sits on the Web.
So...I want to thank Martina for taking the initiative to organise
this. And for asking me to moderate it.
And to all of you panelists, who are participating and reporting on
your very interesting research, I'm hoping that there will be a lot
more conversations like this going forward and that we can all begin to
work together in a collaborative manner to help build a global
knowledge base that will be useful in informing policy discussions.
Because clearly it's needed. There's a lot of bad information out
there, needless to say.
And a lot of misconstructions out there. So good solid,
research-based information is great.
So thank you to everybody. And best of luck. Happy trails. And see
you down the line somewhere.
>> MARTINA FERRACANE: Thank you.
>> WITADA ANUKOONWATTAKA: Thank you, bye.
>> GEOFFROY GUEPIE: Thank you.
>> JOHANNES FRITZ: Thank you.