From the Editor

Abstract

Dear Readers, Welcome to the final issue of The International Trade Journal (ITJ)’s thirtysixth volume. The articles in this issue focus on technology and telecommunications. The first three articles look at different aspects of the relationship between information and communication technologies (ICT) and international trade. The fourth article looks at intellectual property rights provisions of international trade agreements. The fifth article looks at innovation by palm oil exporters in Colombia, while the final article looks at India’s draft e-commerce policy. The first article in this issue, by Simon Abendin, Duan Pingfang, and Etse Nkukpornu, looks at how ICT use has affected trade between the 15 countries in the Economic Community of West African States. Their measure of digital technology takes into account electronic sharing of information, big data use, cross-border e-commerce, mobile and fixed broadband use, basic and advanced digital skills, internet use, and the availability of digital public services. They combine their different measures into a single index using principal component analysis. They find that countries that use digital technologies more intensively trade more with other countries in the region than do countries that have adopted digital technologies less aggressively. The second article, by Radovan Kastratović and Predrag Bjelić, also looks at the relationship between ICT use and exports in 32 European countries. They use three separate variables to capture different aspects of ICT use: percent of turnover from e-commerce, percent of workers that use internet connected computers, and the share of the population that has interacted with public officials over the Internet. They analyze how ICT use has affected service, manufacturing, and agricultural exports. The only measure of ICT use that is consistently associated with exports is the measure of e-commerce. Countries where e-commerce is better developed have higher service and manufacturing exports than other countries. They do not, however, have higher agricultural exports. In contrast, the other two measures are not significantly correlated with any of the three export variables. The third article, by Reth Soeng and Ludo Cuyvers, also looks at how ICT development affects trade, focusing on Cambodia’s service exports. They describe the legal, institutional, and policy framework in the country and look at how the sector’s development has affected Cambodia’s service exports. Using panel data from between 1995 and 2012, they find that ICT development is positively