USITC 2023 Digital Trade Workshop

Overview: The USITC 2023 Digital Trade Workshop will focus on emerging issues related to digital and services trade. The workshop will host prominent speakers from academia, policy institutions, and international organizations to discuss the following topics: i.) availability of data on and measurement of digital trade; ii.) impacts of increased digitization on services trade including from new advances in information and communication technologies (ICT); iii.) measurement and coding of policy barriers to digital trade; iv.) impacts of data policy restrictions; and v.) policy actions that can facilitate digital trade. The keynote speaker will synthesize recent digital trade trends and related research.

Date: Tuesday, June 27, 2023 (virtual on WebEx)

Agenda:

Opening Remarks by USITC Chair Johanson (8:30-8:45 a.m. EST)

Morning Session: Measurement of digital trade; increased digitization and tradability of services (8:45-10:45 a.m. EST)

• Alexis Grimm, U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (measurement of and trends in U.S. trade in ICT and Potentially ICT-Enabled Services)
• Natalie Jefferies and Daniel Robinson, UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) (digital trade trends during the pandemic)
• Daniel Ker, UNCTAD (measurement of cross-border data flows and digital trade in developing countries)
• Alex Jaax, OECD (ICT adoption and other drivers behind the increased tradability of services)

Keynote Speaker: Hildegunn Nordas, Örebro University, Council on Economic Policies (CEP), Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) (10:45-11:30 a.m. EST)

Afternoon Session: Measurement of Digital Trade Policies; Effects of Digital Trade Policies (12:00-2:00 p.m. EST)

• Martina Ferracane, European University Institute (cross-country mapping of legal and regulatory measures affecting digital trade)
• Erik van der Marel, European Centre for International Political Economy (impact of data policy restrictions on services trade)
• María Vásquez Callo-Müller, University of Lucerne (a dataset coding of PTA provisions directly or indirectly regulating digital trade)
• Javier Gonzalez, OECD (mapping of data localisation requirements, impacts of digital trade policies and digital connectivity on trade costs and trade)
• Peter Herman, USITC (impact of internet connectivity and digital trade policies on trade and welfare)

David S. Johanson is the Chairman of the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC). Chairman Johanson served as International Trade Counsel on the Republican staff of the Committee on Finance of the U.S. Senate from 2003 until his USITC appointment in 2011. While on the staff of the Committee on Finance, he was responsible for legislative and policy matters involving negotiations of the World Trade Organization, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and numerous free trade agreements. He assisted in the passage of implementing legislation for free trade agreements between the United States and Australia, Bahrain, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Korea, Morocco, Nicaragua, Oman, Panama, Peru, and Singapore. He also worked on legislative matters concerning trade preference programs (the Generalized System of Preferences, the African Growth and Opportunity Act, the Caribbean Basin Initiative, and the Andean Trade Preference Act), Miscellaneous Tariff Bills, Trade Adjustment Assistance, and the trade-related provisions of the 2008 Farm Bill. Prior to his employment at the Committee on Finance, he practiced international trade law for six years at the law firm of Stewart and Stewart in Washington, D.C. Chairman Johanson holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Stanford University, a Master of Philosophy degree from Cambridge University, and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Texas.

Martha Lawless is Acting Director of the U.S. International Trade Commission’s Office of Industry and Competitiveness Analysis and Chief of the Services Industries Division. She has directed the USITC’s annual Recent Trends in U.S. Services Trade reports since 2014 and has led several of the USITC’s studies on digital trade issues, including the recent Foreign Censorship, Part 1: Policies and Practices Affecting U.S. Businesses report. She is also a major contributor to USITC research and reports on trade and trade barriers in services -- in particular, barriers to trade in digital services; possible economic effects of trade agreements; interconnections between services and goods trade; and the impact of digitization, domestic regulation, and other competitiveness factors on international trade in services. Prior to joining the USITC in 2011, she co-led the Corporate Risk Advisory Group at UBS Investment Bank in London, advising over 200 multinational companies on management of their global operations, including currency, interest-rate, and commodity risk management. Ms. Lawless earned her M.B.A. with specialization in International Finance from the Yale School of Management, M.Sc. in Economics from Trinity College Dublin, and A.B. magna cum laude in History and Economics from Harvard University.

Alexis Grimm is a Senior Research Economist in the Research and Methodology Group of the International Economics Directorate at the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). In this role, Alexis is primarily responsible for researching methods to improve BEA’s international economic accounts statistics. Her area of specialization is international services and the digital economy. Alexis contributes to efforts to improve and enhance international services statistics in many different areas. Most recently, she developed improved methods to estimate the value of trade in travel and air passenger transport services and enhanced the process of estimating nonreported trade in services transactions for service types primarily estimated using information reported on BEA surveys. Alexis also works on developing alternative aggregations of international services statistics in the areas of the digital trade, services trade by enterprise characteristics, and trade in services by mode of supply, which provide a deeper insight into the international supply of services.

Natalie Jefferies has worked at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in the UK for 5 years, mostly in roles relating to trade in services. She is currently Co-head of the Trade and Tourism branch leading a mixture of survey and statistical production teams.

Daniel Robinson leads the ALLCOM and R&D branch within the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in the UK. Daniel has worked at the ONS for around 20 years and is responsible for overseeing the data compilation and results for production for a number of key economic outputs and is here to talk today about one of them, the Digital Economy Survey.

Daniel Ker is an Economist-Statistician in the E-commerce and Digital Economy branch of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). His work is focused on measuring aspects of the digital economy including e-commerce and digital trade. Daniel is an author of the IMF-OECD-UNCTAD-WTO Handbook on Measuring Digital Trade as well as the recent UNCTAD report Measuring the Value of E-commerce. Before joining UNCTAD in 2021, Daniel spent 5 years at the OECD working on topics including measuring the digital transformation and R&D statistics, with publications including Measuring the digital transformation and the G20 Roadmap toward a common framework for measuring the digital economy. Prior to that, Daniel worked at the United Kingdom Office for National Statistics in labour market statistics, National Accounts development, classifications, and as co-Deputy Director for Public Sector Statistics.

Alexander Jaax is a Trade Policy Analyst in the Trade Policy Division of the OECD’s Trade and Agriculture Directorate. His recent work focuses on questions related to trade costs for services and implications of services trade for workers. He also contributes to analyses of global value chains and multinational enterprises. He previously worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE), conducting research on foreign direct investments. Alexander has been a visiting researcher at the National University of Singapore and Harvard Kennedy School and holds a PhD in Economic Geography from LSE.

Hildegunn Kyvik Nordås is Visiting Professor at Örebro University in Sweden, a Senior Associate with the Council on Economic Policies (CEP) in Switzerland and a part-time research professor at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI). Prior to that she was leading the OECD’s work on developing the Services Trade Restrictiveness Indices and related analytical work. She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Bergen, Norway. Her research interest lies in the interface between digital technology, services trade, and regulation and environmental outcomes; areas where she has published extensively.

William M. Powers is Chief Economist and Director of the Office of Economics at the U.S. International Trade Commission. In this role he serves as the Commission’s chief economic adviser and directs economic analysis in factfinding investigations for Congress and the U.S. President and in the Commission’s antidumping and countervailing duty investigations. He is a leader in international efforts to better measure the economic impact of globalization, and recently chaired the APEC Trade-in-Value-Added initiative. He has published on empirical trade topics including trade agreements, global value chains, rules of origin, and trade finance. Dr. Powers previously served as a senior international economist at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) in both the Bush and Obama Administrations. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Michigan and a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Virginia.

Martina Ferracane is passionate about policy-making and technological innovation. She is a Research Fellow at the European University Institute, where she manages the Digital Trade Integration Project. Her research covers digital trade, data governance, and creative digital education. Martina founded and manages FabLab Western Sicily, a non-profit organisation that brings creative digital education to Sicilian schools and she was listed in Forbes 30 Under 30 for her work with a start-up in the area of 3D printing and dentistry. For her work in these areas, she was listed in 2018 among the 15 most influential Italian women on digital issues. She acts regularly as a consultant for several institutions including the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and the World Bank.

Erik van der Marel is Chief Economist at ECIPE, Associate Professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), and Consultant Economist at the World Bank. He is currently also affiliated with the European University Institute (EUI). At the EUI, Erik is working on the Digital Trade Integration (DTI) project and is currently developing several research projects, including the DTI methodology, within the Global Governance Programme of the Global Economics: Trade, Investment and Development research group. His areas of expertise are in digital trade, services trade, cross-border data flows, and their associated regulatory trade policies. Prior to his appointment at ECIPE, Erik was lecturing full-time at the London School of Economics (LSE) where he taught international trade at post-graduate level. He received his PhD in economics from Sciences-Po Paris and did his post-doctorate at the LSE, too.

María Vásquez Callo-Müller is a researcher and consultant on digital trade issues. She is a post-doctoral fellow at Trade Law 4.0 project, led by Prof. Mira Burri, and based at the University of Lucerne. In this capacity she manages the Trade Agreement Provisions on Electronic-commerce and Data (TAPED) dataset. María’s current research focuses on the regulation of digital technologies and trade, particularly in the areas of intellectual property rights (copyright and trade secrets), data governance (data protection and cross-border data flows), and cybersecurity. She regularly consults on digital trade topics, including assignments for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Policy Support Unit (where she was a Google Policy Fellow), the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia ERIA (ERIA), the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP). María holds a Ph.D. in Law from the University of Bern, as well as an LLM in Intellectual Property and Competition Law from the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center (Max Plank Institute for Innovation and Competition) and a Master of Advanced Studies in International Law and Economics (MILE) from the World Trade Institute, University of Bern. She is admitted to practice law in Peru.

Javier López-González is a Senior Economist at the Trade and Agriculture Directorate of the OECD leading the work on digital trade and cross-border data flows. His research focuses on developing frameworks for the analysis of digital trade, including exploring what market openness means in the 21st century; investigating regulatory approaches to cross-border data flows and data localisation (and their economic impacts); understanding the implications of new technologies for trade (e.g. additive manufacturing, artificial intelligence); and identifying potential economic costs and benefits of digital connectivity and digital trade policies on trade. He has previously worked on the drivers and implications of participation in global value chains, including in the context of SMEs. Javier holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Sussex.

Peter Herman is a lead international economist in the Research Division of the Office of Economics at the U.S. International Trade Commission. His work has studied the determinants of international trade with a focus on the quantification of non-tariff trade costs, structural gravity models, and network models of trade. Peter has published articles on these topics in academic journals including the Journal of Development Economics, Review of International Economics, and Review of World Economics. At the International Trade Commission, Peter has led economic modeling analyses for numerous Commission studies, including assessments of the economic impacts of the 2018/19 tariffs on U.S. imports of steel, aluminum, and products from China; the USMCA trade agreement; barriers to global digital trade; and pesticide limits on agriculture trade. He has a PhD and MA in economics from Indiana University and a BA from Westminster College in Salt Lake City.

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Bibliography

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