Advances in Economics, Management and Political Sciences
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Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Business and Policy Studies
Series Vol. 71 , 18 January 2024
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WTO E-commerce Negotiations: A Path to the Multilateral Digital Trade Rules
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Abstract
A sustainable digital market hinges on digital trade rules. Yet, these rules, currently dispersed across various Regional Trade Agreements, and the conventional trade agreements of the WTO can barely align with the rapid growth of digital trade. In 2019, the WTO Plurilateral negotiation on E-commerce opened a new avenue for a multilateral digital trade agreement. This study compares three typical templates of digital trade rule within RTAs and analyzes proposals from developed and developing economies in WTO e-commerce negotiation. It seeks to reveal and resolve critical challenges in forming multilateral digital trade agreements, including concept confusion, the digital divide, and differences in regulatory requirements of data. With the opportunities presented by the WTO's E-commerce negotiations, each party shall focus on defining related concepts of digital trade to ensure clarity, incorporate discussions on technical assistance for LDCs to guarantee digital equality, engage proactively in plurilateral negotiations on data flow security and personal information protection, to formulate digital trade rules that address the regulatory concerns of all parties.
Keywords
Digital Trade Rules, WTO E-Commerce, WTO Plurilateral Negotiation, Cross Border Data flow, Data Localization
References
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Data Availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
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- Volume Title
- Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Business and Policy Studies
- ISBN (Print)
- 978-1-83558-281-7
- ISBN (Online)
- 978-1-83558-282-4
- Published Date
- 18 January 2024
- Series
- Advances in Economics, Management and Political Sciences
- ISSN (Print)
- 2754-1169
- ISSN (Online)
- 2754-1177
- DOI
- 10.54254/2754-1169/71/20241449
- Copyright
- 18 January 2024
- Open Access
- This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited