Regions

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.

Meet Arthur Zang, a 29 year-old Cameroonian engineer who invented the handheld Cardio-Pad, the world’s first medical tablet facilitating heart examinations and remote diagnosis. The Cardio-Pad is a touch-screen tablet device for conducting cardiac tests such as electrocardiograms in remote locations, and then sending the results to cardiologists in city centers often hundreds of miles away.

Rwanda’s government, which has declared a vision of making the country a technology and innovation hub for Africa, has partnered with the startup Zipline to facilitate the real-time delivery of urgent medical supplies, such as blood or vaccines, to patients in remote locations via drones.

In the last few years, a growing movement has advocated “responsible” technology development and use, particularly for artificial intelligence. The problem is that many of these efforts go beyond statements of generally agreed-upon principles and attempt to impose specific, elitist values and agendas on technology development.

For many years Korea had the honor of leading the world in industrial robot adoption. But that lead is now in doubt, as other nations, especially China, but also Japan and the United States, saw much faster increases in robot adoption in 2021, according to the International Federation of Robotics.

A strong dollar makes U.S. imports to Korea more expensive and Korean exports to the United States less expensive, which is great for American consumers but bad for American workers, and vice versa for Korea.

Stringent drug price controls have significantly hampered the competitive and innovative capacity of Japan’s biopharmaceutical industry in recent decades, serving as a warning for U.S. policymakers considering introducing Medicare Part D drug price controls in 2022.

As the U.S. Congress hopefully finalizes a wide-ranging industrial policy legislative package, a number of pundits are pointing to Japan's economic performance as evidence that industrial policy is doomed to failure. But ITIF’s Hamilton Index tells a different story.

China did not cause income inequality. And it is only partially responsible for low productivity and wage growth. But if it had lived up to its WTO obligations, the world’s faith in globalization would have suffered much less than it has.

A recent report by Japan’s National Institute of Standards and Technology found that China accounted for 4,744 of the approximately 17,440 scientific research papers that made up the top 1 percent in terms of citations. This accounted for 27.2 percent of that group.

U.S. policymakers must insist that China comply with its WTO commitments in cultural and entertainment industries and, more broadly, adopt an approach that Chinese enterprises are permitted no more access to U.S. cultural and entertainment markets than U.S. companies receive in China.

While China surged ahead in 1995 in terms of advanced industry production, the current odds are stacked in India’s favour. If correct actions are taken, we can easily surpass China.

The fall in the value-added of foreign inputs as a share of China’s gross exports reflects an increased reliance on domestic production of intermediate goods and services and a shift toward production for domestic consumption.

Innovation ecosystems are increasingly complex and diverse, but there are common markers of core strength. This visualization benchmarks 96 states and regions across Germany, Italy, the United States, and Canada.

Innovation ecosystems are increasingly complex and diverse, but there are common markers of core strength. In this report, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, the German Economic Institute, the Institute for Competitiveness, and the Macdonald-Laurier Institute benchmark 96 states and regions across Germany, Italy, the United States, and Canada.

European and U.S. policymakers have proposed imposing monitoring obligations on Internet intermediaries to improve online safety. Despite their best efforts, these proposals risk undermining users’ privacy by eliminating the use of end-to-end encryption. Therefore, policymakers should not pursue them.

Europe professes to want greater transatlantic digital cooperation, yet it is systemically excluding U.S. firms from participating in its technical standards-setting processes. A real transatlantic digital alliance requires real EU-U.S. cooperation on technical standards.

Pushing the Online Safety Bill through parliament too quickly will do more harm than good.

International mergers, international cartels, and multinationals engaging with customers across borders underscore the need for greater legal certainty when it comes to antitrust enforcement and policy.

In September, ministers will gather in Pittsburgh to consider how their governments should respond to the energy and climate innovation imperative. Building on Glasgow, the meeting should strive to fill critical gaps in areas such as capital-intensive demonstration projects and innovation-friendly trade in carbon-intensive goods.

The WTO’s approval of a TRIPS waiver for IP related to COVID-19 vaccines is essentially a shotgun blast completely missing the broadside of a barn.

Putin’s attack should galvanize real foreign policy, defense policy, and industrial policy cooperation among democratic, allied nations.

Nations embracing data liberalism, especially Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States, should work collectively to develop new rules to support data flows and more forcefully resist efforts to limit data flows.

If Latin America wants to avoid this fate, it needs to make a key decision: does it want to look east to China or north to the United States. The United States is leading the world in efforts to get China to roll back its unfair, mercantilist trade and economic policies. But that task will be much harder if the region sides with China or avoids the fight altogether and sits on the sidelines.

Before policymakers can act, there needs to be a consensus that there is a problem, and a role for policy in solving it. When it comes to competitiveness, too many in Washington don’t recognize this.

Colombia faces significant political, social, and economic hurdles in building its digital economy, yet its progress toward developing a robust strategy deserves recognition. It has an opportunity to be a trailblazer and regional role model.

Citizens and businesses rely on government websites to access important information and services. Unfortunately, many Colombian government websites fail to meet basic website standards for security, speed, mobile friendliness, and accessibility.

Colombian citizens and businesses use government websites every day to find important information and access public services, and so it is important for those websites to meet basic standards for security, speed, mobile friendliness, or accessibility. According to a new report[RC1] released jointly today by two leading think tanks, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) and TicTac, Colombian government agencies have opportunities to modernize their sites by further investing in cybersecurity, mobile-friendly web design, and cloud-based hosting.