Global Norm-Making of Digital Trade: Comparative Analysis on the Trade Agreements

Abstract

The digital technology is fundamentally changing the international trade landscape. Global trade has expanded from commodities trade to services trade, and now even further to digital trade. The digitalization of services industry is further pushing forward to a more innovative business model, changing the whole platform of the international trade. Despite the remarkable development, the existing international rules and statistical methods cannot fully cover the unprecedented issues of digital trade. The legal vacuum exist as the multilateral rules for digital trade has not shown much of a progress ever since the introduction of the moratorium on custom duties on electronic transmissions in 1998. Now, countries are turning their eyes to bilateral negotiations. The developed economies such as the United States and the European Union are leading the bilateral norm-making of digital trade through free trade agreements. Particularly, mega-FTAs such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership include the core elements of digital trade such as data free flow and data localization. As rules made under the TPP require higher level of liberalization, it gives huge policy implications for South Korea which has a high ICT trade dependency. All in all, this paper attempts to analyze the past attempts and evolution of global rule-making on digital trade, examine the statistical analysis methods on quantifying digital trade, and propose policy implications for Korea.