High-level International Seminar on Cross-border Digital Trade
[Video address]
Your Excellencies,
Distinguished officials,
Ladies and gentlemen, Dear friends.
Selamat Siang and greetings from Geneva.
It is a great honor to address you today, at this important gathering on the future of digital trade and its challenges, including the challenge to measure it properly.
The Digital economy is a truly fascinating frontier.
Today, almost anyone, anywhere, can start a business, reach customers, and access services with just a simple tap on their phone.
And this is especially fascinating for the ASEAN region, which boasts a very dynamic e-commerce market of three hundred and fifty million (350) digital consumers, up from two hundred and ninety million (290) barely two years ago; a market that Google predicts will be worth 1 trillion dollars in 2030, up from one hundred and seventy-five billion (175) in twenty-twenty-one (2021).
But the ASEAN dynamism is not just economic, it is political. ASEAN countries are stepping up in their negotiations for the ASEAN Digital Economy Framework Agreement (DEFA), which seeks to facilitate seamless cross-border digital trade by harmonizing regulations, streamlining customs procedures, and promoting interoperability between digital systems.
ASEAN has some of the first international real-time payment systems in the world, such as the ‘PayNow’ and ‘PromptPay’ of Singapore and Thailand, where people can transfer money just with their mobiles in cost-less, instant transactions.
These will be game-changers in the world of cross-border digital trade.
They are stories of trust, security, and financial inclusion, reasons to be optimistic about the impact of the ASEAN digital towards its citizens and small and medium sized businesses.
Ladies and gentlemen,
To shape clear policy, we need clear data. For too long, this has been a big challenge for digital trade.
The Handbook on Measuring Digital Trade, jointly developed by the IMF, the OECD, UNCTAD, and the WTO, marks a significant step in solving this problem.
And there are some lessons we can share.
The first lesson is that we need to look beyond what is obvious.
It's easy to get caught up in the excitement of e-commerce and digital payments.
But digital trade is far more expansive than that. These are just the tip of the iceberg.
Below is data that flows across borders, software that powers our businesses, digital services that are transforming entire sectors. These intangibles are hard to measure through traditional trade statistics, and yet they are impossible to ignore.
The second key lesson is to standardize to optimize.
Standardized definitions and methodologies are essential for collecting consistent and comparable data.
This will enable progress tracking over time, benchmark performance, and identify areas that need to be improved.
The DEFA is an excellent framework in this direction, we are encouraged by this promising possibility.
But third and most important lesson is to collaborate to elevate. The fact is that digital trade transcends borders, and so should our approach to promote it, through harmonized policies and payment systems.
And we must give common answers to common challenges, from intellectual property rights and cybersecurity to consumer protection and competition policy, from connectivity to taxation, from market concentration to pollution and e-waste.
As Secretariat of the UN Commission on Science and Technology, UNCTAD is proud to receive a new mandate on data governance from a development perspective – and we look forward to working with you to advance with concrete steps in this direction.
Your excellencies,
In closing, digital trade has the power to transform our world.
Let us harness this power responsibly, equitably, and sustainably to create a future where everyone benefits from the digital revolution. The future is digital, and it is ours to shape.
I thank you.