Regions

The UK’s proposed under-16 social media ban reflects a recurring moral panic about new technologies and would undermine youth connection, parental choice, and online privacy without evidence that blanket bans address the real causes of harms to children.

The UK’s proposed Cyber Security and Resilience Bill presents a much-needed opportunity to kickstart the growth of the UK’s lagging cyber insurance market, which will make businesses more resilient to the increasing frequency and significance of cyberattacks.

The collapse of a UK espionage case against alleged Chinese spies highlights Britain’s refusal to call China a security threat, exposing a dangerous weakness driven by economic dependence.

The UK Online Safety Act aims to protect children online but its vague rules and strict enforcement have led to over-censorship, threatening legitimate communities, and Parliament should clarify content definitions, allow remediation periods, and require judicial review to fix these issues.

The idea that nations can invoke “AI sovereignty” to draw on U.S. technology when convenient, while walling off their markets, is not a bargain U.S. policymakers should entertain.

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation’s Centre for Canadian Innovation and Competitiveness (CCIC) appreciates the opportunity to contribute to Global Affairs Canada’s consultation on a potential Canada-Mercosur Free Trade Agreement.

Clear and practical merger guidelines are important for giving businesses predictability and ensuring consistent enforcement in a hugely consequential area of the Canadian economy.

Canada should prioritize boosting productivity through the adoption of advanced technologies across its firms and governments, rather than pursuing domestic ownership of existing infrastructure in the name of “digital sovereignty.”

Canada’s path to lasting competitiveness lies in strategic indispensability: specializing in a small number of high value-added goods or services that the world can’t do without. Ottawa must continue making explicit decisions about what gets built and what does not; otherwise, it risks spending heavily with little to show for it.

While the Draft Guidelines generally and correctly focus on condemning only behavior that results in anticompetitive effects, in several specific respects they could be fine-tuned to provide for greater administrability and better limit false positives so as to ensure that innovation and competition flourish in Canada.

A new irrigation technology incorporating AI sensors reduces water use by 30 percent and methane emissions by 47 percent compared to continuous irrigation methods.

Proposed changes to Kenya’s competition regime will hinder, not help its digital economy. Rather than impose substantial changes based on the false premise that digital markets require special treatment, Kenya should use existing enforcement tools to police its growing digital markets.

ITIF’s submission focuses on the ITC’s interest in recent developments in the digital economy for key SSA markets, including national and regional regulatory and policy measures and market conditions that affect digital trade.

When attempting to evaluate the effect that a policy intervention can have on development or innovation, researchers and policymakers routinely look to short-term impacts, both out of urgency and because of the difficulty in maintaining contact with participants over several years.

Over the last decade, mobile money services have brought banking to populations that have lacked formal financial services by allowing users to manage money on their mobile phones. First launched in Kenya in 2007, 96 percent of Kenyan households now use mobile money and can withdraw funds in physical currency from 110,000 agents across the country.

As Korea’s labor debate moves into digital policy, unions risk harming workers in the next generation of industries by prioritizing protections for existing jobs over preparing workers for technological transition.

Korea is trying to unlock high quality data for AI competitiveness, but its push for strict domestic data storage risks isolating developers from the global infrastructure and partnerships modern AI depends on. A more effective approach would protect sensitive data through targeted safeguards rather than blunt geographic restrictions that ultimately undermine innovation and market competition.

Seventy percent of young Koreans hold university degrees. Only 14 percent of jobs are in large firms. The most immediate concern is not jobs disappearing due to AI, but that there are too few high-quality jobs in the first place.

While the Hyundai Motor case now sits at the center of Korea’s AI jobs debate, the evidence suggests that the nation’s more immediate constraints are weak productivity growth and uneven labor-market adjustment—not large-scale technological displacement. How Korea responds will shape its competitiveness in a high-cost, aging manufacturing economy under intensifying global competition.

After South Korea reduced its tax credit for automation in 2018 from 7 percent to 3 percent for large firms, South Korean industries, on average, reduced robot installations by 28 percent compared with their Japanese counterparts.

Boosting U.S. competitiveness in national power industries is necessary, but not sufficient to avoid losing to China. America also must take measures to slow the PRC’s progress toward global dominance. This report provides more than 100 actionable recommendations for the administration and Congress. Western allies should take many of the same steps.

Advanced manufacturers based in East Asia are expanding investment into the U.S. economy. Yet, many of their internal value chains remain anchored in China, giving the PRC significant leverage over U.S. interests. U.S. policymakers should respond both defensively and offensively.

If the USTR is serious about protecting U.S. consumers and businesses from copyright piracy and trademark counterfeiting, it should designate Chinese online platforms Temu, AliExpress, and SHEIN as notorious markets.

Maintaining R&D leadership in advanced industries is critical to U.S. economic competitiveness and national power. But on a size- and wage-adjusted basis, China is rapidly gaining ground. Congress needs to boost corporate R&D incentives to prevent America from falling behind.

The United States is at serious risk of becoming dependent on China for a wide array of key technologies and products, which would significantly shift the global balance of techno-economic power. Only fundamental policy change can potentially keep the United States from defeat.

A government backed push to replace U.S. payment networks in Europe is less about consumer benefit and more about reducing reliance on American firms, risking economic harm to the U.S. and opening the door for Chinese competitors in a fragmented market.

Europe once led the world in biopharmaceutical innovation, but it lost ground after adopting policies that weakened incentives for R&D and innovation. America must learn from Europe’s experience to preserve its own biopharma leadership and the related economic benefits and access to the most innovative drugs.

Growing tensions between the United States and Europe over digital trade and technology regulation risk weakening the transatlantic alliance at a time of intensifying competition with China. Washington sees European rules as disproportionately targeting U.S. firms, while Europe views them as necessary to reduce dependence on American technology. Unless both sides address these differing threat perceptions and pursue regulatory compatibility, fragmentation could undermine their ability to shape global technology rules and allow China to fill the gap.

The inconsistent and flawed theories of harm on both sides of the Atlantic reflect, to borrow from former FTC Chair Lina Khan, a real “Amazon’s antitrust paradox,” if there ever was one.

The European Parliament has disabled built-in AI features on corporate tablets and phones issued to MEPs and staff over concerns that data sent to cloud services by these features presented a security risk. This decision is misguided because it does not address security risks, drives AI use into the shadows, disrupts everyday productivity tools, and imposes disproportionate costs on the Parliament’s smaller delegations.

The United States should use MC14 to push for a WTO that actively promotes fair market competition—not one that passively accepts non-market policies, overcapacity, and coercive distortions that are undermining the global trading system.

To protect individuals while preserving the open information ecosystem that supports innovation, policymakers should focus on outputs rather than training inputs, encourage transparency norms for autonomous AI agents, and create a safe harbor for responsible use of publicly available data.

WEF should articulate a global productivity agenda to make a meaningful contribution, because the kind of capitalism we have today is not the reason for slow growth in many developing economies.

Governments are entering a critical phase in the adoption of AI. It is already contributing to everyday public sector work, and the question is no longer whether to adopt AI, but how to do so both effectively and responsibly. The Public Sector AI Adoption Index 2026 focuses on the human side of AI adoption, examining how it is experienced by public servants every day.

Mandatory adoption of EU-style digital rules amounts to regulatory imperialism for many countries in the Global South. It limits technology adoption, raises compliance costs, and undermines the ability of local firms to compete with Western ones.

A bill proposing ex ante regulation of digital markets in Brazil would harm efficiency and innovation. Given the significance of this bill, the Brazilian legislature should not proceed with a motion to bypass typical civil procedures and debate.

Brazil’s Digital Markets Bill promises to tame tech giants, but in reality, it threatens to import Europe’s flawed regulatory experiment—punishing innovation more than protecting consumers

This report ranks more than 200 regions across Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and the United States on 13 commonly available indicators of innovation competitiveness, and offers policymakers a guide to bolstering regional and national innovation capacity.

A combination of privacy-protective age verification systems utilizing digital forms of identification and AI, parental controls that are readily available and easy to use, and greater transparency from digital platforms would increase children’s safety and privacy, encourage innovation in improved safety and privacy controls, and better inform policymakers and parents on next steps to protect children.

Mexico's newly elected president, Claudia Sheinbaum, can reverse President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's anti-innovation policies toward genetically modified maize, and improve the lives of small farmers across Mexico.