Legal and Economic Analysis on Digital Trade Policies and Rulemaking in WTO, RTA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The environment surrounding the digital economy is evolving, and governmentshave not yet reached a sufficient level of consensus to establish international trade norms governing it.This mainly results from divergent national perspectives on the key issues surrounding digital trade.It is challenging to meet all the demands of the countries, such as U.S. whose liberal approach to digital trade is based on its competitiveness in the global market, the EU to protect the region's single market and its companies, China to secure future opportunities, and developing countries to protect domestic companies.The purpose of this study is to discuss the recent politics and trends of digital trade negotiations in various international fora.This study aims to provide an account of existing norms and standards which are essential for digital trade and analysis of several priority issues for digital trade norms in terms of RTAs; for example, data-related regulations that are critical for the liberalization of digital commerce (e.g., data transfer), and prohibition of localization of data facilities.In addition, the study analyzes the implications and limitations of digital trade agreements that have already been made among the RTA and WTO JSI discussion at the multilateral level through literature analysis published by international organizations and statistical data.This study found the "heterogeneity" of digital trade agreements and policies.Not only does every government have various approaches to digital regulation, but also digital trade covers a wide range of issues that lead to overlapping rules and a complicated network of numerous digital trade agreements with varying partner countries.Even in some agreements negotiated by the same country, each provision, the scope, and the ambition of its agreement are heterogeneous.This paper looked into the different binding commitments and exception clauses of some main provisions of RTAs which can show the countries' intent and ambition towards specific policy issues.It also showed the correlation that if the country is restrictive, its digital policy could differ from the other countries' policies.Lastly, the study highlights trade barriers, which undermine the effectiveness of making rules.It introduces key concepts of digital trade barriers and discusses the restrictiveness and divergence of digital trade policies in detail.The barriers can be classified as tariff-related and non-tariff barriers: a moratorium on electronic transmission, restriction on cross-border data flow, and data infrastructure localization.It examines the political economy of the digital trade agenda and the legal landscape of provisions within the digital trade negotiation, such as USMCA (United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement), CPTPP (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership), DEPA, and WTO JSI.The signing of multilateral digital trade agreementsthrough the WTO is likely to be prolonged; however, it is a crucial and necessary tool for advancing the digital environment.Therefore, digital trade agreements must be agreed upon by many countries with enough policy space, and at the same time, it should contain enough content on various issues that have been made so far.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".