Digital Economy

In recent years, a growing number of governments have adopted policies aimed at supporting the transition towards a digital economy. The World Trade Report 2020 looks at these policy trends and at how trade and the WTO fit with them.
Trade and trade policies have historically been important engines for innovation. In particular, the multilateral trading system has contributed significantly to the global diffusion of innovation and technology by fostering predictable global market conditions and by underpinning the development of global value chains. As data become an essential input in the digital economy, firms rely more on intangible assets than on physical ones, and digital firms are able to reach global markets faster without the amount of physical investment previously necessary in other sectors. Success in the digital economy will depend on openness, access to information and communication technology (ICT) goods and services, collaboration on research projects, and the diffusion of knowledge and new technology.

The OECD Digital Economy Outlook 2020 examines trends and analyses emerging opportunities and challenges in the digital economy. It highlights how OECD countries and partner economies are taking advantage of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the Internet to meet their public policy objectives. Through comparative evidence, it informs policy makers of regulatory practices and policy options to help maximise the potential of the digital economy as a driver for innovation and inclusive growth.
This third edition of the OECD Digital Economy Outlook provides a holistic overview of converging trends, policy developments and data on both the supply and demand sides of the digital economy. It illustrates how the digital transformation is affecting economies and societies. Finally, it provides a special focus on how the COVID-19 pandemic is amplifying opportunities and challenges from the digital transformation.

Digitalisation brings about disruptive transformations in society, ranging from access to services, interaction with others, obtaining and sharing information, to metamorphoses in the nature and organisation of work. Learning is no exception. Digitalisation of learning is the process by which education and training, and generally skills acquisition, development and recognition, are being transformed by the use of digital technologies. Digital technologies have already changed access to information and knowledge in everyday life. Online multimedia tutorials can be downloaded for any daily tasks. Nowadays, online tools and forums are the most effective means to master a statistical computer programme.To measure the current situation of digital learning in European countries and to draw attention to this very important issue, the Jobs & Skills Unit at the Centre for European Policy Studies (C EPS) has developed an Index of Readiness for Digital Lifelong Learning (IRDLL) for the European Union (EU)’s 27 countries. This Executive Summary presents the results of the research divided into four major chapters. The first deals with digital learning as a topic – what it is, and what it is good for. The second chapter presents the results of the IRDLL overall and of its individual subcomponents. It also contains the main messages that can be distilled for national governments and other stakeholders. The third part of the report looks at what the EU, at supranational level, is currently doing with regard to digitalisation of learning and draws recommendations for the next European Commission (EC). The last chapter contains 27 individual country sheets – ju st one page long – to present a reader-friendly summary of key findings for each EU member state (MS). In the past, the technological and infrastructural angle of the phenomenon dominated discussions on digital learning. More recently, it has become evident that digital learning encompasses how digital technologies are integrated in teaching and learning approaches, within an organisational and institutional context, considering also users’ ability to make the best use of such technologies and embrace change.

The Advanced Drone Operations Toolkit provides a modular approach for governments to enable societally important and safe drone projects. Each recommendation is based upon lessons learned from the latest successful pilot projects in Switzerland, Rwanda, and Malawi – saving lives and creating new forms of aerial logistics. This toolkit is the first multi-stakeholder publication to collect and share vital lessons from across the planet as an enabler for new drone programs that can save lives safely. By leveraging the formative work of innovative governments and supported by those private companies leading the technological revolution, the toolkit accelerates access to airspace and begins to promote a unified vision for autonomous flight.

The world of work is changing in response to technological progress, globalisation and ageing populations. In addition, new organisational business models and evolving worker preferences are contributing to the emergence of new forms of work. Despite widespread anxiety about potential job destruction driven by technological change and globalisation, a sharp decline in overall employment seems unlikely. While certain jobs and tasks are disappearing, others are emerging and employment has been growing. As these transformations occur, a key challenge lies in managing the transition of workers in declining industries and regions towards new job opportunities. There are also concerns about job quality. While diversity in employment contracts can provide welcome flexibility for many firms and workers, important challenges remain in ensuring the quality of non-standard work. Moreover, labour market disparities could increase further unless determined policy action is taken to ensure a more equal sharing of the costs of structural adjustment in the world of work. While there are risks, there are also many opportunities – and the future of work is not set in stone. With the right policies and institutions, the future of work can be one of more and better jobs for all.

The EU’s new data privacy rules, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), will have a negative impact on the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI) in Europe, putting EU firms at a competitive disadvantage compared with their competitors in North America and Asia. The GDPR’s AI-limiting provisions do little to protect consumers, and may, in some cases, even harm them. The EU should reform the GDPR so that these rules do not tie down its digital economy in the coming years.

Economies are complex production systems with myriad subcomponent production systems—that is, industries—from manufacturing to health care to retail. What and how these production systems produce is grounded in technology. So, as technologies change, production systems change—around the world. Today, the most important and widely shared technologies are digital information technologies that have evolved from the mainframe and mini-computing systems of the 1960s and 70s. They include an array of personal computing devices, back-office servers, IT-embedded machines, and cloud-based services that are connected or dynamically provisioned to users over private networks or the Internet. But the world is now beginning to transform into a new kind of digital system, one that will not only build on existing devices and systems, but also increasingly will incorporate emerging technologies such as sensors, robotics, and artificial intelligence as they improve in price and performance. This next digital economy will be significantly more connected (with many more things, and many more types of things networked, including in more advanced wireless, satellite, and wireline networks), more automated (as devices and systems enable more work to be done by machines), and smarter (as algorithms play increasingly important roles in sensing—and making sense of—all this).

Technology in many ways is perfectly conceived to operate in the workplace, bringing an ability to operate around the clock at increasing levels of accuracy and productivity. Since the Industrial Revolution, machines have been the ideal colleague, performing some of the most mind-numbing tasks and freeing up human partners to do more interesting and productive things. However, in the near future, new digital technologies are set to take the next step, graduating from the factory floor to the boardroom and applying themselves to more complex, cognitive activities. Technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) are a game changer for automation in the workplace. Like ambitious young go-getters, they promise to take on more responsibility and make better decisions, and the implications for workers, companies, and policy makers are significant and pressing.

ATMs constitute a critical component in today’s infrastructure for facilitating cash payments. However, ongoing digitalisation (cashless payments, e-commerce and online banking) is challenging the role of ATMs and putting pressure on the cash infrastructure in the EU. The shift from cash to cashless payments reduces the need for cash withdrawals and the rise of online banking challenges the bank branch as the traditionally most prevalent location for ATMs. Moreover, the introduction of pricing policies might also change the dynamics in EU ATM markets. Transparency and price caps on the so-called dynamic currency conversion (DCC) as well as potential reductions in interchange fees will put pressure on the revenues of certain ATMs.
Against this background, this report assesses the sensitivity of EU ATM markets to ongoing digitalisation and pricing policies. The impact of these developments is assessed across business models in Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, which are representative of the ATM markets in all EU member states.