Digital Trade in the Pacific
Digital Trade is becoming a major site of contestation between existing digital powerhouses, who are each seeking to write the rules to their advantage. This is happening within the World Trade Organization (WTO), in regional trade negotiations (such as the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework) and in the Pacific’s regional infrastructure (the Pacific Regional E-Commerce Strategy).
Rhetoric accompanying digital trade negotiations and reform promises the economy of the future. However it is crucial to understand that rules written for the digital economy extend into all facets of our lives. This means that people must be central to our digital futures and that any negotiations must have a broad understanding of the individual and collective implications of digital policy.
Webinar: Whose Digital Future? Writing the Digital Rules in the Pacific
While the digital economy holds much promise, for the Pacific there are still major structural hurdles with connectivity for communities to be able to best use online technologies. Despite this, there is a rush to write legally binding rules for the digital economy with the major players looking to lock in their advantages and lock out others through a range of agreements. This webinar will look at the key issues associated with the digital economy and data value, who is writing the rules, how are the rules being written, and how Indigenous knowledge is being valued and how it needs to be protected in a digital world.
Thursday August 24th
2pm Fiji/NZ Time, 12pm Sydney, 7:30am Delhi, 3pm Apia
Speakers:
Anita Gurumurthy (Executive Director - IT For Change)
Sanya Reid Smith (Senior Legal Advisor - Third World Network) (Download Presentation)
Adam Wolfenden (Deputy Coordinator - Pacific Network on Globalisation) (Download Presentation)
Dr Frances Koya Vakauta (Team Leader, Culture for Development - The Pacific Community)
Re-Thinking The Pacific’s E-Commerce Strategy: Putting Cooperation, Digital Sovereignty and Development at the Core
In August 2021, the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat published a Regional E-Commerce Strategy and Roadmap for Pacific Island Countries, sponsored by the Australian Aid Program. The Strategy is unequivocally optimistic that e-commerce will be a “game-changer” for Pacific Island Countries to achieve “unprecedented levels of inclusive, sustainable development in a post-COVID-19 Blue Pacific” - despite acknowledging that the previous magic bullet, trade liberalisation, failed to achieve the promised integration of the Islands’ economies into global value chains.
In his Foreword to the Strategy, the Pacific Islands Forum Secretary General, Henry Puna, recognised a number of barriers that Pacific Islands face: weak policy and regulatory environments, poor logistics, difficult and costly access to online marketplaces, inadequate trade facilitation practices for small parcels, and limited and costly internet connectivity. These are real and pressing problems. There is an understandable concern that, unless these challenges can be effectively addressed, Pacific Island Countries will become even more marginalised in what is often described as the digital 21st century.
Moreover, these obstacles and the strategies to overcome them do not exist in a vacuum. The digital ecosystem in which e-commerce takes place is complex, multifaceted and constantly changing. It is currently dominated by a small number of powerful near-monopolies or oligopolies, mostly domiciled in the United States or China. It is also increasingly governed by international trade agreements that reinforce this uneven global marketplace.
Maximising the potential benefits of digital technologies and minimising the risks to developing countries is particularly challenging for small island states like the Pacific Island Countries. PANG’s review of the Pacific E-commerce Strategy argues for the alternative approach promoted by the United Nations Conference for Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in several recent reports on digital economy strategies for developing countries - that regional, South-South and trilateral South-South-North cooperation, in which e-commerce is one element of a holistic digital ecosystem, offers a preferable pathway to developing a realistic, workable and development-focused strategy for the Pacific region in ways that it can control.
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Trade Rules VS Digital Sovereignty
As originally conceived, free trade involves a reciprocal exchange of tariff liberalisation commitments for mutual benefits. The digital domain does not fit that model of reciprocal trade-offs. Nor are the rules simply, or even primarily, about trade.
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Data Sovereignty
Data is central to any digital development strategy, including for e-commerce. In the digital 21st century, data holds the key to innovations, to the development of ever-more sophisticated software and algorithms, and to more efficient technologies, products and services. How to access, control, and utilise data generated within the region for its own benefit – exercising data sovereignty – is perhaps the greatest challenge, but one that is not addressed in the Pacific E-commerce Strategy.
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Digital Development and Online Trading
To harness the economic and social gains of digitalisation within this environment, Pacific Island Countries need to establish a regional e-commerce infrastructure that can maximise the benefits for Pacific businesses, consumers and communities, while addressing known obstacles and maintaining a precautionary approach. That requires all participating countries to retain their policy and regulatory autonomy.
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Fintech
Finance is one of the most uneven playing fields in the Pacific region. The Pacific E-commerce Strategy proposes a range of fintech services and payment options for the region. Unfortunately, Pacific Islands governments have limited capacity to regulate even the existing financial services sector. Fintech is both higher risk and less well understood.
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A Cooperation-Based E-Commerce Strategy
There is a need for a regional strategy that promotes holistic digital development, recognising that e-commerce has social, cultural, economic, environmental and commercial dimensions. This alternative approach relies heavily on Pacific Island Countries learning from and collaborating with developing countries that are in the forefront of digital development initiatives.
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Securing Policy Space and Pacific Governance
There is a need to ensure that Pacific Island Countries, nationally and regionally, retain the policy and regulatory space to develop an appropriate and effective holistic digital development strategy that is consistent with their broader Framework for Pacific Regionalism and the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent.
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Recommendations
Pacific governments must be able to protect their sovereign right and responsibility to regulate the digital domain, including data, in the broad public interest. That includes not entering into coercive trade agreements that constrain their authority to do so as well as suspending and then revising any existing agreements, such as PACER Plus, which already do that.