The Digital Economy Report 2019 on "Value creation and capture: Implications for developing countries" takes stock of recent trends in the global digital landscape and discusses the development and policy implications of data and digital platforms. A key feature of the evolving digital economy is the increasing role of digital data as an economic resource, together with digital platforms as new influential actors, with capacity to collect, process, analyze and monetize data. The report considers policy options for countries to help ensure that they capture a fair part of the value created in the digital economy for inclusive development. Key issues include the market impact of emerging technologies and digital platforms, the impact on smaller businesses in developing countries and the implications for infrastructure, entrepreneurship, skills, competition, data flows, data protection, taxation and other relevant policies.
Economies and societies are undergoing digital transformations that bring both opportunities and challenges and countries’ preparedness to seize the benefits of a digital world is largely dependent on the skills of their population.
This report identifies seven policy dimensions that allow governments – together with citizens, firms and stakeholders – to shape digital transformation to improve lives. It also highlights key opportunities, challenges and policies related to each dimension, offers new insights, evidence and analysis, and provides recommendations for better policies in the digital age.
Measuring the Digital Transformation: A Roadmap for the Future provides new insights into the state of the digital transformation by mapping indicators across a range of areas – from education and innovation, to trade and economic and social outcomes – against current digital policy issues, as presented in Going Digital: Shaping Policies, Improving Lives.
The increasingly digitalized global economy is undermining the usefulness of many traditional tax concepts. In addition to issues of double taxation and double non-taxation, important questions arise concerning the allocation of taxing rights in respect of income from cross-border digital transactions. This is the first book to analyse what changes are possible, necessary and feasible in order to forestall the unravelling of the existing international tax framework. Focusing in turn on the legal framework, specific proposals for adapting tax concepts for the digital economy, types of transactions and administrative issues such as those around data protection and digital currencies, the expert contributors discuss such challenges to taxation as the following: the pervasiveness of intangible assets; new value creation models; the ascendance of the sharing economy and digital services; virtual currencies; the importance of user participation for digital platforms; cloud computing; the impact of Big Data on tax enforcement; virtual business presence; and the influence of robotization. Throughout, the authors describe and analyse proposals made by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the European Union (EU) and individual countries and their likely impact going forward. They also attend to the limits imposed on reform possibilities by public international law, EU law and constitutional law. It is generally acknowledged that there is a need to monitor how the digital transformation may be impacting value creation. This book is a key milestone toward developing a durable, long-term solution to the tax challenges posed by the digitalization of the economy. With its thorough scrutiny of proposals for digital services tax and virtual permanent establishments, insightful analysis of digital services and detailed description of the impact of big data on tax administration and taxpayer protection, it will quickly prove indispensable for tax practitioners and the international tax community more generally.
The OECD Digital Economy Outlook 2020 examines trends and analyses emerging opportunities and challenges in the digital economy. 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.
Work is constantly reshaped by technological progress. New ways of production are adopted, markets expand, and societies evolve. But some changes provoke more attention than others, in part due to the vast uncertainty involved in making predictions about the future. The 2019 World Development Report will study how the nature of work is changing as a result of advances in technology today. Technological progress disrupts existing systems. A new social contract is needed to smooth the transition and guard against rising inequality. Significant investments in human capital throughout a person’s lifecycle are vital to this effort. If workers are to stay competitive against machines they need to train or retool existing skills. A social protection system that includes a minimum basic level of protection for workers and citizens can complement new forms of employment. Improved private sector policies to encourage startup activity and competition can help countries compete in the digital age. Governments also need to ensure that firms pay their fair share of taxes, in part to fund this new social contract. The 2019 World Development Report presents an analysis of these issues based upon the available evidence.
China’s digital economy has expanded rapidly in recent years. While average digitalization of the economy remains lower than in advanced economies, digitalization is already high in certain regions and sectors, in particular e-commerce and fintech, and costal regions. Such transformation has boosted productivity growth, with varying impact on employment across sectors. Going forward, digitalization will continue to reshape the Chinese economy by improving efficiency, softening though not reversing, the downward trend of potential growth as the economy matures. The government should play a vital role in maximizing the benefits of digitalization while minimizing related risks, such as potential labor disruption, privacy infringement, emerging oligopolies, and financial risks.
This issue includes a general assessment, a special chapter on the effects of digitalisation on productivity and a chapter summarising developments and providing projections for each individual country.
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) is a founding member of the Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development, which is an international, multi-stakeholder initiative to improve the availability and quality of ICT data and indicators. One of its key achievements is the development of a core list of ICT indicators for the production of internationally comparable statistics. This list was first endorsed by the United Nations Statistical Commission at its 38th session in March 2007 and has since been updated regularly. The Commission encouraged countries to use that list in their data collection programmes; a first version of the Manual for the Production of Statistics on the Information Economy was published at the end of 2007. An updated version was published in 2009. The current edition, entitled Manual for the Production of Statistics on the Digital Economy, was prepared to reflect the many changes that have taken place in the past decade in terms of access and use of ICTs. Compared to earlier versions, it expands the coverage of the measurement of e-commerce, trade in ICT services and trade in ICT-enabled (or digitally delivered) services. It contains more model questionnaires and reflects the most recent revisions of the Partnership's list of core ICT indicators. The Manual is intended to guide statisticians from developing countries through all the steps involved in the production and dissemination of statistics related to e-commerce and the digital economy.
