Digital trade, digital economy and the digital economy partnership agreement (DEPA)

From the beginning of the new century developmentalist economists indicated the importance of the coming digital economy based on information, computing and communication, including reference to the profound effects of the internet and the web on the organization of firms and the linkages and connections between the local and the global (Brynjolfsson & Kahin, 2002). twenty years later analysts are talking freely about the internet or web economy and trying to measure interconnectivities in terms of crowdsourcing, smart energy design, and the reconstruction of the global value chain to explore ‘intelligent capitalism’. the emphasis has fallen on financialization and the growth of next generation strategic digital technologies of deep learning, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, 5 G/6G, and bioinformatics that operate at the nanolevel to promote technological convergence and lead the next phase of globalization (Peters, 2020). Business innovation, trade facilitation, and development are seen to depend on leveraging consumer psychology and of promoting scale economies within what is referred to as ‘platform capitalism’. increasingly social media practices collapse the public and the personal, and hinge on the costs of storing, sharing, and analysing data which has decreased with increased activity in the Cloud as the internet continues to evolve. the digital economy is seen as providing a new architecture for a transformation of the labour market based on job growth, competencies and skills in the digital economy. there is a new respect for social networks and service ecosystems in the age of networked intelligence and consumption-based forecasting. of fundamental importance is the digital transformation of finance, large investment banks, big asset managers, and hedge fund management but also the new group of sovereign investors that have emerged as influential capital markets players and investment firms within a $30 trillion global market. at the same time, under Covid pandemic conditions the digital economy has become a potent driving force in the world economy particularly for service industries that utilise symbolic goods and services that can be reduced to highly transportable exchange and circulation such as services of trade facilitation, banking and insurance, software, entertainment, scientific research and publishing and international education. as Yue et al. (2020) explain the concept of ‘digital economy’ was first used in the 1990s developed a global focus at the ‘G20 digital Economy development and Cooperation initiative’ at the G20 Summit in Hangzhou, the digital economy has ‘become a new focus of China’s economic development and is becoming a policy focus: ‘China’s economic development is facing a "three-phase superposition" period of speed shift, structural adjustment and power conversion, thus vigorous digital economy has become a new driving force for China’s economy and an important force leading the national innovation strategy’ (p. 1). the G20 conference was encouraged to ‘collectively leverage digital opportunities, cope with challenges, and promote the digital economy to drive inclusive economic growth and development’.1 the final statement provides a useful description of the digital economy that