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.

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.

The United States can no longer afford to trade U.S. market access for geopolitical alignment, and other nations can no longer afford to stay on the sidelines as the United States does the hard work of limiting China’s economic, technological, and foreign-policy aggression alone.

Including data localization in its National Data Strategy would be a critical misstep that would undermine what Australia is otherwise working to achieve at home and globally in terms of digital policy.

Over the last quarter-century, Korea's advanced-industry performance has been superlative and lags only behind Taiwan.

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.

There’s a battle being fought now for the soul of the global trade and economic system; it’s imperative that like-minded nations collaborate to emerge victorious in it.

It is important for conservatives to recognize that China poses a critical threat to America’s future and that we need a strong, technologically vibrant economy to respond. This in turn requires a national industrial policy.

The Biden administration and its “Neo-Brandeisian” supporters in Congress are seeking to break up large tech companies, but national-security-minded advisers warn it would strengthen America’s biggest ad­versary, China. They're right, just as an earlier generation of national security advisers was right to warn the Eisenhower administration against breaking up AT&T.

When national governments take steps to help their own economies, they can end up helping other economies, too. Sometimes that result is a win-win. But all too often the result is beneficial for a nation’s direct competitors in the fierce race for global advantage in key, innovation-based industries.

The European Commission’s vigilance in monitoring large digital operators reveals an unfortunate distrust toward technology.

As policymakers worldwide explore new anti-counterfeiting measures in their regions, a consensus is emerging in the United States and the EU on best practices for e-commerce platforms to combat online sales of counterfeit goods.

Attempts to achieve grandeur lead French politicians to flirt with decadence—and to revive the Gaullist tradition of alleged neutrality between, on the one hand, the United States, and on the other hand its main rival—yesterday, the Soviet Union, and today, China.

Comparisons between U.S. and European broadband prices abound, but their respective markets are built on such entirely different cost structures as to make any comparison between the two meaningless without accounting for the differences in necessary expenditures.

The European Commission is considering how to regulate products derived from gene editing and has solicited public comment, but the Commission missing a golden opportunity—again.

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.

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.

Compared to major competitors, U.S. output in key advanced industries is weak and declining. Congress and the administration should launch an economic “moon shot” initiative committing to increase the concentration of these industries in the U.S. economy by at least 20 percentage points relative to the global average within a decade.

It is a mistake to think that the Internet needs to be governed by one set of laws. Just as nations have different laws in the offline world, they should have different laws in the online world depending on their values, institutions, and legal traditions.

Although skeptics call IP an “elite concern,” recent reports from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), and the European Patent Office (EPO) show the positive impact IP has on small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs), overall employment, and regionsal and global economies.

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.

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.

Brazilian economic growth has been faltering steadily for years, from an average growth rate of 4.5% from 2006 to 2010, to 2.1% from 2011, to just 1.1% in 2017 and 2018. To say that Brazil’s economy needs a short in the arm is an understatement.