State of the Digital Economy in the Commonwealth
Advances in digital technologies are changing what and how we trade, lowering barriers to internationalisation and fuelling the rise of e-commerce and borderless digital trade, diversifying the content of traded goods and services, and enabling new players to engage in international trade.
Digitalisation affords opportunities for our Commonwealth to build new industries, devise new ways to deliver better services, and enhance market access through digital trade. Advanced digital production technologies create new ways to accelerate innovation, boost productivity and raise the value-added content of goods produced in Commonwealth countries. More generally, the rise of the digital economy is creating new economic pathways, livelihoods and job opportunities that support inclusive and sustainable development across the Commonwealth. It also creates new avenues to expand the role of women in trade.
Harnessing these gains within the Commonwealth requires appropriate policies and regulatory approaches that allow individuals, entrepreneurs and businesses to capitalise fully on the opportunities provided by new digital technologies.
This study fills an important gap by providing new knowledge on the state of the digital economy in the Commonwealth, the challenges posed by digitalisation, and the opportunities available for Commonwealth members to harness the benefits of digitalisation for development and to boost intra-Commonwealth trade.
Digital Policies & Regulations
Repository of Digital Policies & Regulations
The CCA has developed an online Repository of Digital Policies and Regulations that covers all Commonwealth countries and contains information on individual policies and regulations in specific countries.
The repository is intended to provide a frame of reference for Commonwealth members wanting to devise and implement appropriate policies to support digital transformation, create an enabling environment for digital trade, and harness the benefits of digital transformation.
To maximise its value, this platform is accessible to policy-makers and regulators in Commonwealth member countries, as well as other stakeholders and the wider public in the Commonwealth and beyond.
Analysis: Digital Agriculture & Fisheries Policies
Within the agricultural and fisheries sectors, digitalisation is seen as a ‘game changer’ for transforming the sectors in low- and middle-income countries, including those across the Commonwealth.
Digitisation is linked to increased productivity for multiple sectors, including agriculture.
Digitalisation for agriculture and fisheries can be defined to consist of three pillars, namely digital innovations, data infrastructure and business development services, which develop in the context of a broader enabling environments for digitalisation.
Digital Agriculture
Report: State of Digital Agriculture in the Commonwealth
The State of Digital Agriculture in the Commonwealth report shows how digitalisation of the agriculture sector is underway across the Commonwealth.
It argues that whether digitalisation fulfils its promise, or it becomes just another technological hype for development, depends on our approach to its deployment, especially for the most vulnerable communities and regions that could benefit more from its potential.
The policy guide is produced at a time when the agricultural sector is a priority in the policy agendas of many governments globally and is vital to the economies of most Commonwealth member states.
It recognises that to maximise the impact of the agriculture sector transformation agenda, new and frontier innovations must be at the forefront. Digitalisation is one of the key frontier innovations. But it’s not about the innovation, it is about the process, to see the impact on the people.
The report takes a policy approach to digitalisation against the conventional focus on profiling digital technologies and services for agriculture. A critical contribution of the report is the framing of digital agriculture beyond digital technologies and services. The results in each region were based on an assessment using the “digital agriculture framework” developed by the Secretariat in collaboration with other partners, which consists of three pillars and a base - pillar 1 (digital innovations), pillar 2 (data infrastructure), pillar 3 (business development), and the base (enabling environment).
Report: Assessing the Feasibility of Digitising the Kava Value Chain in the Pacific
The economic analysis undertaken in this report highlights that kava is a unique crop in the Pacific, both economically and socially.
It has been used across the region for centuries as a core part of cultural ceremonies and events, and in recent years has become increasingly important from a development perspective. There are thriving domestic markets across the Pacific, providing an income to a high proportion of the populations, and export markets are growing.
Kava is now the largest merchandise export in Tonga and Vanuatu, and Fiji’s largest agricultural export.
Capacity Building for MSMEs
As part of Business Development Services (BDS) capacity building efforts, four MSMEs were selected and their enterprises profiled through short promotional videos and infographics.
The goal for developing these knowledge products was to highlight the work of these MSMEs for potential users of their products and services as well as investors.
The videos relating to Digital Agriculture include:
Digital Fisheries
Report: State of Digital Agriculture in the Commonwealth
The State of Digital Fisheries in the Commonwealth report shows how digitalisation of the fisheries sector is underway across the Commonwealth.
Fisheries are inherently complex systems fraught with challenges. In addition, fishing is one of the most dangerous occupations globally and in some regions suffers from human rights abuses.
Aside from these challenges, fisheries provide livelihoods and a primary source of protein to many of the world’s coastal communities, particularly those in developing nations. It is, therefore, imperative that the challenges faced in fisheries are well understood and solutions are found to overcome them.
Technology, when combined with good governance, has a role to play in closing current knowledge gaps and in finding solutions to fishery challenges to help ensure sustainable, safe and equitable fisheries. More specifically, digital innovations along with data infrastructure, business development, and appropriate enabling environments hold promise in improving the future sustainability of fisheries.
This report reviews the current state of the art of digitalisation in each the five Commonwealth regions by taking a structured literature review approach supplemented by interviews with key informant experts.
Capacity Building for MSMEs
As part of Business Development Services (BDS) capacity building efforts, four MSMEs were selected and their enterprises profiled through short promotional videos and infographics.
The goal for developing these knowledge products was to highlight the work of these MSMEs for potential users of their products and services as well as investors.
The videos relating to Digital Fisheries include:
Digital Industrial Policymaking
A Policymaker's Guide to Manufacturing 4.0 is a digital-first Guide developed by CCA to assist Commonwealth policymakers, especially those in least developed countries (LDCs) and small island developing states (SIDS), to understand the transformative impact of new digital technologies on their industrial development.
It explores how to develop policy settings to take advantage of new and emerging opportunities while addressing potential barriers along the way.
New and emerging technologies and processes are changing economic norms, reshaping the ways in which firms manufacture products, the business models they adopt and how they continue to innovate going forward.
Digital technologies are increasingly applied to, and integrated with, industrial manufacturing.
This all changes the nature industry and challenges our traditional interpretation of what constitutes industrial development.
Collectively, we call these changes “Manufacturing 4.0” and, for countries across the Commonwealth, the adoption of Manufacturing 4.0 opens new opportunities to address developmental challenges in several areas. This includes skills development and employment, innovation, competitiveness, and inclusivity.
New technologies mean many new products, processes and solutions are becoming cheaper and more accessible for businesses across the Commonwealth, including LDCs and SIDS.
Paperless Trade
There are clear economic and political imperatives to accelerating digital trade facilitation and legal reform for digitalisation, with potential total benefits of nearly US$1.2 trillion to Commonwealth trade by 2026.
This report attempts to quantify the potential impact of legal reform to enable the use of the so-called “transferable records” on Commonwealth trade. “Transferable records” are paper-based documents or instruments used in domestic or international trade and trade finance such as bills of lading, bills of exchange, promissory notes, warehouse receipts, guarantees and standby letters of credit. Since the beginnings of trade between individuals, companies and nations, these records have been manual; there are an estimated 4 billion paper-based documents that are being processed at any one point in time around the world according to the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC).
The research covers 54 diverse Commonwealth economies and presents a picture of the potential for cost reductions and trade increases as a result of the introduction of legal reform to enable the use of electronic transferable records across the Commonwealth.
It determines that costs will, on average, fall by around 75 per cent and for some costs as much as 81 per cent. This itself could enable as much as US$90 billion in additional trade across the Commonwealth. If combined with measures to use electronic transferable records in trade finance, the resulting multiplier effect could enable a total of nearly US$1.2 trillion in additional trade across the Commonwealth. In some countries where the costs of trade are disproportionately high relative to the revenues received, moving toward paperless trade will have the effect of creating trade where previously very little existed.
