Digital Trade Revolution: What’s at Stake if the WTO Fails its Global E-Commerce Deal?

The latest episode of our Foreign Press Podcast, the Association of Foreign Press Correspondents (AFPC-USA) explores recent events within the World Trade Organization (WTO) that resulted in approval of a new draft of digital trade rules through the Joint Statement Initiative (JSI) on Electronic Commerce. More than 80 countries collaborated to bring about this milestone—and did so without the participation of the United States.

However, there is much at stake in the event WTO members fail to adopt the agreement, a very real possibility that would scuttle perhaps the most significant attempt to cultivate a more equitable digital trade environment, upending commitments for cooperation and development.

To facilitate a greater understanding of this complex issue, AFPC-USA spoke with Dr. Deborah Elms, the Head of Trade Policy at the Hinrich Foundation. Dr. Elms, who was the Executive Director and Founder of the Asian Trade Centre (ATC) as well as the President of the Asia Business Trade Association (ABTA) and the Board Director of the Asian Trade Centre Foundation (ATCF)., offers valuable insights on the draft deal. The deal, which is vulnerable to regulatory fragmentation, was the subject of her recent research for the Foundation examining the e-commerce agreement’s impact on digital trade.

Dr. Elms met with Alan Herrera, AFPC-USA’s Editorial Supervisor, to discuss this matter in detail.

This episode of the Foreign Press Podcast was produced in partnership with the Hinrich Foundation. AFPC-USA is solely responsible for the content of this episode. 

Alan Herrera: Hello and welcome to the Foreign Press Podcast! I'm Alan Herrera. This podcast is an educational program brought to you by the Association of Foreign Press Correspondents in the United States. That's AFPC-USA. This episode is developed in partnership with the Hinrich Foundation. AFPC-USA is solely responsible for the content of this episode.

Today we'll dive into a historic milestone in global trade: over 80 countries have united to draft new digital trade rules through the Joint Statement Initiative (JSI) on Electronic Commerce. This marks the first time the World Trade Organization has achieved such a feat without the United States. From economic powerhouses like China and the European Union to smaller nations like Benin and Laos, this agreement sets the stage for the future of digital trade, emphasizing the critical need for consistent regulations in our increasingly digital world.

To help us understand this event and its implications, we are joined today by Dr. Deborah Elms, the Head of Trade Policy at the Hinrich Foundation. Dr. Elms, who served as the Executive Director and Founder of the Asian Trade Center, has extensive experience working with governments, international organizations, and businesses and is one of the leading experts on trade policy in the region.

Dr. Elms recently published a comprehensive article for the organization in which she elaborated on the significance of the e-commerce JSI. Our listeners will discover that its impact is much more profound than it might appear on the surface.

Dr. Elms, thank you so much for being here with me today. It's a pleasure to have you back on our Foreign Press Podcast. 

Deborah Elms: It's an honor to be here and I'm delighted to be back with you once more. 

AH: Thank you so much. Last time that you and I met you introduced me to this method of plurilateral negotiation within the WTO, the Joint Statement Initiatives. And you recently released, you published some very interesting research into this, the JSIs as you refer to them. So recently, according to research that you published last month, you mentioned that there had been a “stabilized text” that had been released. So, I am curious to understand why is the release of the stabilized text for the JSI on electronic commerce specifically since you focused on digital trade, why is this stabilized text considered a historic breakthrough for the WTO? What are the next steps for integrating the JSI rules into the broader WTO framework and what challenges might arise from this situation that we're now in? 

DE: It's a great series of questions, and I would say part of the problem that we have in trade is that we use language like “stabilized text,” “JSIs,” and “WTO,” which leaves everybody just scratching their heads. What are we even talking about? So let me back up just a tad and explain it in a little more detail and then get into why this particular thing matters so much. The World Trade Organization, which is our global trade body, has no rules on digital. It came into being in 1995. And just for reference for your younger listeners, 1995 is the first year that we had the World Wide Web. So, there wasn't really a digital world at the time that the WTO came into existence. And so the rule book, which is pretty extensive, doesn't contain any explicit references really to digital. And since then, we've really struggled to get the members of the WTO to agree on what rules make sense in the digital world. 

The trade folks still call it e-commerce. The non-trade people would argue it's about [the] digital economy or digital trade, but we don't have rules. And this has been a real obstacle for the development of digital. At the beginning, it was fine. At the beginning of the digital world it was fine because it was new, it was evolving. It wasn't clear what the regulations or rules should be or ought to be. And so we had a long period where there were really no rules. Now, however, governments have decided this is a bad idea as well, and they are increasingly regulating different aspects of digital. The problem of course, if you're a company or a consumer, is that the rules now can be different in different jurisdictions. In one market it looks like this. In another market, it looks like that, you can do this with AI, you can't do that with AI, you can do this with personal data, you can do something else with personal data and so forth. 

And so what they've been trying to do at the WTO is come up with some consistent set of rules that are agreed upon by as many members as possible. So that gets us to the launch of what they called the Joint Statement Initiative on Electronic Commerce in 2017. The idea there was, “Okay, if we can't get all of us to agree, if 166 now, well now we're 166. If we can't all agree on what we should do in digital, let's take a group of us and start making rules. And even if it's not the whole membership, many is better than none.” So, they started with 71 members, I think in 2017 who said, “Yeah, let's start negotiating on these rules.” And they've been working hard on it since then. The release of this text that we just got is the culmination of five years’ worth of negotiating effort. 

AH: Oh, wow.

Deborah Elms

DE: So the group has grown. So it was originally 71, it's now in its nineties, not all of the 90 agreed to this text, which tells you how difficult this has been to get an approval. But more than 80 have said, “Yeah, the text makes sense to us. We're happy with the way that it looks.” And so it was released now as a way of getting the members to look at it and to say either, “Yes, we're fine with it and we're part of the negotiations and we're happy with it,” [or] “We're part of the negotiations and we're not happy with it and here's the things that we need to be changed or that we need to think about domestically before we can sign on or we're not part of the agreement at all, but we could be, now that we know what it's going to do, maybe we could join it at this point.” And so they've released this text and that's where we're at. So why does it matter? It matters because after all of this time, as we sit here in the middle of 2024, they are closer than they have been to creating rules that cover the digital economy. 

AH: So, you just reminded me of something that, before I get to my next question, you just reminded me of how when we met at the beginning of the year, the first time, our conversation largely focused on consensus. So, there's actually been a wider consensus this time?

DH: No. So one of the challenges that this agreement in particular faces is the members were content to let a group of them go off on the sidelines and talk. They were fine with starting this. I mean, it was a little challenging, but they got it across the line. “Yes, you can talk.” But now that they've got a potential agreement in hand, the focus is back on, “Okay, well what are we going to do with that agreement? How are we going to make sure that this agreement on e-commerce gets hooked into the larger global rule book on trade at the WTO?” And for that, we have no consensus. And in fact, one of the sad parts, I mean mostly this is a happy story, but there is a bit of a sting at the tail, which is we have a couple of these Joint Statement Initiatives, which were an attempt to take a group of members off to discuss certain things, whether it was helping small businesses, whether it was working on services, whether it was dealing with investment or e-commerce. 

And when they finish, they come back to the WTO, they say, “Here's our agreement. Let's make sure that we put it in the part of the legal text where it applies to all of us or some of us.” However, they're all different. So the rules are a little bit different for each one. But the point is that we have had a hard time with the return back to the large group and to get something anchored into the larger setting. And the e-commerce agreement is particularly challenging because when you agree to these rules, most likely you are only giving the benefits to people who are in the agreement. Now, I'm sure most of your listeners would say, “Well, duh. I mean if you wanted to be part of it, you would be part of it. And if you don't want to be part of it, don't be part of it.”

But one of the challenges of the WTO is that the rules are supposed to be for everybody and the benefits are supposed to float to everybody. And so if you're not going to do that, if you're going to restrict the benefits to just those folks who signed on, that's a challenge for the institution. And there are a couple of members, not very many, but this is where the consensus principle is an issue. You can block decisions with just one upset member. And so how do we get this agreement, this stabilized text anchored into the WTO when you don't have consensus that it should be allowed to go forward is the next big battle. That will be, I hope, not a long one, but I suspect sadly will be a long battle. 

AH: That does make a lot of sense given just the makeup of the organization, the different things that we've spoken about before. And well, this is another thing actually that's coming to mind after listening to your explanation. Could you elaborate? I suppose could you elaborate on the range of economies that are involved in the JSI, let's say from advanced to least developed countries? And I guess I'm curious, can you tell me how their inclusion impacts the agreement's effectiveness? 

DE: That's a great question. I think that typically, when we talk about how you are going to make these side agreements in the WTO with some subset of members, there is an argument that says there's no point in doing one of these side agreements if the majority of the market players are not in that agreement. Because if four of us… Let's imagine four countries that have almost no trade with one another decide to do something that's not helpful for the institution as a whole. So we usually say there should be some threshold of market concentration to allow these kinds of agreements to go forward. We saw this especially in something called the Information Technology Agreement, or ITA. In the ITA, we had members who collectively made up more than 90% of the electronics sector. And at the time we were talking about computers, television sets, VCRs, and they came together to say, “We should have these things be without tariffs because the tariffs are stopping the spread of digital.”

So we should allow these kinds of products, these ICT products, to spread more easily. And since they had more than 90% of the global market share at the time, everyone said, “That's fine. If you guys, the big players agree to drop your tariffs to zero, we can maintain our tariffs if we choose to do so, we can do that, that's fine under the rules of that agreement. But you say you wanted it zero, that's fine. We're okay with that.” So there's sort of a presumption that you need to have a lot of the market covered in order for these side agreements to work. And in the e-commerce JSI that we just finished, the 90+ members that at least were part of the negotiations represent most of the digital economy. It included at the time the US, the Europeans, the Chinese, the Japanese—fill in the blank, who is your favorite digital economy—but all were led in fact by Japan, Australia, and Singapore as what are called “code conveners.”

And so they got all of the big players to participate in the negotiations. And up until the last minute when the United States refused to sign the stabilized text, they had them all in the agreement as well. But they said, “We can't just look at big advanced industrialized economies. That's also not a sensible way for us to go forward. We need to include as much of the full membership as possible.” Of course, they invited them all so any member could become part of the JSI. And in the end, they have in this group of 90+ countries a real range from the largest players to the smallest, including least developed countries from countries that have extensive companies and presence in the digital world to countries that just don't. And so you have a real mix, which I think for me is testimony to the fact that digital matters to everyone. 

And if you can't get the digital rules consistent, you have real problems. And actually, I would argue, and I have argued repeatedly, that the worst outcome for developing countries in particular is regulatory fragmentation - rules that are different. That's a real problem if you're a developing country or if you're a small company that's trying to negotiate or navigate a complicated world. So I would have hoped, probably unrealistically hoped, but I would've hoped that most of the developing economies in the WTO would've said, “This actually matters to us. We may not have specific things that we want to see included in this agreement, but we want to be part of it. It matters to the future. And if we're not part of the negotiations and if we're not part of the conversation, we are cutting our own companies and our own consumers off from whatever the benefits are of this consistent policy world that we're making that matters so much for the future. 

AH: It sounds to me like, well, you do a good job of explaining how this is really just an environment with so many competing priorities, right. And as I understand it, the text includes six key areas that I believe you mentioned, one of which is enabling electronic commerce, and then there's openness, there's trust, there's transparency, cooperation, and then I believe development as well as telecommunications and exceptions. So can you explain for our listeners the significance of each of these areas in regulating digital trade? It's just very interesting to me to see how there's all these key areas, all of these factors, and yet of course the reality, once you get all these people in these rooms together, it's just so complicated. It's much more intense than people think. 

DE: I mean, it is hard. And I think one of the difficulties that you have when you negotiate just on digital trade is that increasingly all trade is digital. It's very hard to imagine any transaction cross-border that doesn't have some kind of digital element in it, whether it's moving a good across a border, a thing across a border, or a service across the border. Even investments are often digital, have some sort of digital element, digital component to them. And so it can be hard to say, well, what is the specifically digital thing that we're worried about compared to the larger problem of trade? So let's take trade facilitation as the first topic that is often in these digital economy agreements. What do you put in there? So you already move goods across borders, and so if we're moving goods across a border, what is it that we need to think about when we think about a digitally delivered good or a digitally enabled or there's all kinds of definitional questions, something that does with digital?

Okay, so one of the things you need to think about is, well, right now, or for most countries, that box that is going between my country and your country has to go with a whole lot of paperwork attached to it. What's in the box? Where did the materials come from in the box? What's the invoice for the box? Who's got the insurance for the box? Where's the bank paperwork for the box? There's a lot of paperwork that goes with your average cross-border delivery of goods. One of the key provisions always, and also in this JSI, is that that paperwork should be submitted electronically as much as possible. So that I think is helpful because increasingly, and we saw this certainly during COVID, if you can't move physical pieces of paper, then trade stops. That's silly. We live in a world in which you can mostly manage these paper transactions online and legally allowing digital paperwork to be equally recognized to physical paperwork with a chop and a stamp and whatever else is on it is very important. 

So that's a provision in the JSI. And you can imagine if 80+ countries agree that paperwork should be digital as much as possible, that opens up a whole lot more trade options, including for a lot of smaller companies because to get paperwork is a pain in the neck. You have to print it, you have to schlep it to an office, you have to get some official to stamp it, you carry it to another office. It's labor intensive and it's a problem. So, if you can do it online, that is so much easier, especially for smaller firms. So paperless trade is a key part of this agreement. Also, things like electronic signatures. So, once I finish my electronic paperwork, do I have to then, and we see this a lot, print it, sign it, and then scan it and send it back again, or can I just use an electronic signature as legally approved? 

And so there's a commitment in there to say, “No, electronic signatures are authorized. We agree that those have legal validity or we will do our best to make sure that those have legal validity because sometimes the internal processes in a country to make that happen domestically can take time. But we agree that's where we're headed. So we agree you can submit things online. Your signature has to be approved online. We have now got some new provisions on things like invoicing that you should be allowed to submit invoicing electronically.” So again, the trade facilitation part of this agreement is thinking about what are the digital things that we can do to move goods across borders faster? Very helpful. And most people don't have objections to those things in principle. Then it gets a little bit more complicated, like what do we do with information? So we want to have information that flows back and forth across borders.

What are we going to do about that? And one of the biggest battles that they've had for the last five years in the JSI is over things like personal data. What are we going to do about the movement of personal data across borders? Especially because we have very different ideas about how we protect personal data across the membership. The EU has a particular view, the Americans have a different view, the Chinese have a very different view, and other countries fall sort of in between. And a country like Singapore has to try to navigate all of these different perspectives because they have agreements and trade with all of these big players. So trying to come up with some kind of middle ground approach that satisfies or at least makes people less upset has been hard. So, the data flows really matter. The trust issue matters, which is things that are not yet in the JSI, but you can imagine how this would work if you order something online and it arrives and it's faulty. Now what? From an overseas vendor.

We have to start setting up rules to allow consumers to get online consumer protection and to have that apply in a cross-border setting. So you can see why this is complicated, not really in the JSI yet, but you just have to start somewhere. So, start with the discussions about trust and how are we going to manage this? And then I'm not going to go through all six, but I'm going to just jump to the development dimension. Many of these provisions, which make sense, right? Again, we should allow people to have electronic signatures. We should think about electronic or online consumer protection, great ideas, but the implementation can be a real difficulty, especially if you are a poorer developing country. So the agreement has embedded in it commitments for cooperation and for development to try to help countries that are not currently ready to get ready to be as much as part of the agreement as they possibly can in the shortest amount of time so that they can really take advantage of having consistent trade rules. 

AH: Considering all of this, then I guess another thing that comes to mind, does this encompass many of the major criticisms related to data movement and hosting requirements in the JSI text? I'm curious about how all of that impacts global digital trade. 

DE: Unfortunately, there are at least two big issues that you would like to see in any digital agreement, and they have to do with: What kind of data do we allow? What kind of information do we allow to go over a border and where do you have to put that information? So in technical terms, it's cross-border data flows and data localization. Those were two because there's no point in discussing any other elements of digital if you don't talk about how we are going to manage information flows and where do we have to host that information is also part of that discussion. They were on the agenda, these two big points were on the agenda early on, but last October, the United States said that it could not support any outcome that included those two provisions because it's an internal battle in the US, no consensus domestically, couldn't do it at the JSI, and so they were removed from the text. 

This I think is a real challenge for the JSI, because again, if you want digital trade to flow, then it's important to think about, well, what about the information? The bedrock of digital is data. How are we going to manage the movement of data across borders and are we going to put rules in place that allow or require data to be hosted locally or we're allowing data to be hosted wherever it makes sense on the planet? Or preferably, we're allowing data to be hosted in multiple locations to help lower risk of disaster, whether that's a hacking incident or whether that's a natural disaster incident. We would like to have the security of knowing that data is backed up somewhere other than the primary location. Unfortunately, again, taken out in October and then in another blow as if it wasn't bad enough when the final stabilized text came out, the United States said it wouldn't sign the stabilized text.

So, at the request of the US, they pulled two of the key provisions in October and then in the summer pulled the whole thing from the US perspective. That's a problem given the dominance and importance of the United States in the digital ecosystem, and it's perhaps a fixable problem. Perhaps the US comes back in, it's an electoral politics problem. Maybe after this election in November, there'll be more enthusiasm. It's a little unclear, but I think it is a real shame that you have carved out two crucial provisions and then even with that didn't get the US across the line at the moment. 

AH: So how have other major members like China and the EU reacted to the stabilized text and what does their acceptance mean for global digital trade and perhaps, well, these provisions that we're discussing at this moment?

DE: Well, I think it's quite significant actually, that you managed to get a digital agreement that the EU and China both felt comfortable with. I mean, that in itself is quite remarkable given their often opposed interests on especially things like privacy, cybersecurity, etc. Partly, because we removed the more controversial issues, as I said, but also because again, a little bit of watering down for the trade nerds in the audience, Article 25 of the JSI text is a very weak part of the agreement, but I think that was the compromise position to get it past both the EU and China in particular. And the US at the time was more in favor of a watered-down provision. And I think that's, again, unfortunate. If I had my dream world, the agreement ultimately would look different. But the reality is you need to get 80 to 90 members at least to agree to a set of rules and you have to start someplace. 

So even though it's not the agreement that I necessarily would've said is the be all and end all of agreements, the fact that it exists is crucial. And then if we can get it anchored into the WTO, that's fantastic. That's half of the membership all following similar pathways they have. Even if the agreement says you shall endeavor to do whatever it is, you're supposed to be endeavoring in the same general direction, that's got to be better than no endeavoring, right? We have to be moving in the same general orientation. 

AH: Absolutely.

DE: If you get half of the members to do that, that's fantastic. And then you now have a platform on which you could revise it, you could meet, take it out, you could say, “Well, this implementation is not really working. How could we adjust that? So, I think without any rules, it's very hard to have a conversation about digital. So, you have to start somewhere and I would say that the stabilized text is useful as the starting point. It's useful on its own, but it's also useful as we go forward. 

AH: So then in light of this agreement and moving forward, what are the prospects for future digital trade agreements within the WTO and perhaps other international trade bodies? What can we expect? 

DE: Well, I would love to say that it's going to be a piece of cake. Unfortunately, the evidence at the moment is not great. I mean, we have just two simple examples for me. One of the other JSIs created an informal working group for micro, small, and medium sized enterprises at the WTO. Okay, so let me just repeat that. It's an informal working group of small companies. It doesn't have a full membership. Now, this is just a mystery to me. How in the world could you possibly argue against helping small companies? Every single economy is dominated by small businesses. They are the backbone of every single economy, and yet we can't get 166 members to say, “Yes, we support an informal working group on this issue.” That's a problem. A second challenge in the JSI category. So we didn't have all of the members, we got some of the members, not all of the members. 

In a second working group, one of these JSIs on investment. They have tried four times now to hook that agreement into the larger WTO context. And they have failed because there are members, very vocal opposition from three members, maybe less than three, depends on which day you're talking about. But basically, a very small number of members, which is a problem because if you can't get that investment agreement anchored into the WTO, you will have additional challenges thinking about how you are going to get an e-commerce agreement, which is much more controversial, anchored into the WTO. And so I would like to say this is the beginning of a new dawn and it's going to be awesome, but I'm a little nervous that the members will struggle to implement this within the WTO framework. And at some point, and it won't be right away because they’ll give time to see if this solves itself.

But at some point they may have to start thinking about, well, what do we do if we never get agreement to put it into the WTO? Do we just pretend that it's there and we follow the rules anyways? Do we do something outside of the WTO, which is a real problem for the organization? How are we going to actually make this real? 

AH: Your point about small businesses in particular is very fascinating to me. It is fascinating to me that there could just not be a consensus on this issue, as you said. So I mean, I suppose what I'm wondering right now is what specific benefits can businesses and consumers expect from the consistent digital trade rules established by the JSI? And I'm just curious why anybody would be against it?

DE: Yeah, that’s a great set of questions. I mean, what would you be against? Well, let's start with the paperless trade discussion, just because that one is, I think that that one is the easiest for people to grasp. I can say to you, “We should have paperless trade,” and your average person would say, “Yes, that sounds like a great idea. I'm on my computer, my phone all day long. Let's make it paperless. Great.” You can imagine that there is a set of folks who are not happy about this. And who would those people be? Those are the people who deal with paper. So, if you're a company whose existence is built on, “I get the paper, I get the paper approved, I move the paper to the next place, they approve it,” that's a challenge. So, there is some strong pushback from companies who have built their entire business model around moving paper, number one. 

Hinrich Foundation

Number two, you can get pushback around people who make side payments attached to that paper. So, if you want to move goods back and forth across the border, there are an awful lot of side payments that go on and paper makes it easier. You could just potentially have an envelope underneath your piece of paper and then guess what? My stuff gets cleared faster than your stuff. That's harder to do in a digital world. So, a lot of companies and government officials are wary about what happens when we move to online processes where those envelopes don't move so easily. And then third is an issue related to governments that I have seen personally many times, which is governments will look at paperless trade and they will say, “But what are we going to do all day long?” There was a really fantastic video that the Malaysian customs put together for an APEC event, and they showed this video of the transition in Malaysia from paper-based trade to paperless trade. 

And the video is beautifully graphic, about stacks and stacks and stacks of paper going around, being trundled around all day long and being in piles that are meters tall and on carts and trolleys and tied up with ribbons and then [you] hand it to the next person. And then you could see these, especially these ladies in the video, I'm sure there were men too, but the video is mostly women, stamping all day long. Paper, stamp, paper, stamp, paper, stamp, paper, stamp all day long, and then they transition to digital. And so now all that paper is gone, and there are all of these people who are sitting in front of computers. When they showed this at APEC to a room full of customs officials from the 21 members of APEC, there was an audible gasp from some of them because they could imagine, “Wait a second, this looks like job loss to me, right? If we had jobs where we were stamping paper all day long, what happens if we move to digital and we don't have that many people needed to stamp documents?”

Now, of course, this is a really narrow and parochial view, but if it's your job, then I guess even if you spend your whole day stamping papers, it's a job. So, the Malaysian customs, just to finish the Malaysian custom story, went to great pains to say, actually they hired more people after they went digital because instead of stamping all day long, what they did was they actually read the papers. First of all, they actually had time to go through and look at what was being submitted. And most crucially, and I think for me, this is kind of an important point, they had more time to look for problems to identify shipments that actually should be inspected, where they could be counterfeit, they could be fake, they could be fraudulent, they could be mislabeled, they could be carrying contraband of all kinds. It could be drugs, it could be guns, it could be who knows what.

And so they were actually able to expand their workforce, but do so in a way that was much smarter than spending the whole day just stamping documents. This is a tough argument sometimes though with governments because they just look at the jobs and they say, “Oh, this is going to be an issue for us.” So I think these are sort of practical problems that you encounter literally in every sentence of an agreement like this JSI on e-commerce, where you say, “Well, that's a very sensible solution. And certainly for an outsider, you say, “Well, of course you should be moving online. But then when you start to think about the practicalities of that, what would that look like? What does it do for the workforce? What does it do for investment? What happens if we don't have the same level of digital access? You start to get nervous if you're a government, and I think that's why it takes so long to get these agreements. 

AH: You do such a great job of communicating these very complex topics. So, I am very thankful that you're facilitating my understanding very much.

DE: Thank you.

AH: Yes, yes. No, I love it. And it's fascinating, and I think that this is something that will certainly appeal to all of our listeners, because of course, this is a very dense topic. And I suppose my final question for you today is: Could you tell me, how does this agreement, I'm spitballing here, but how does this agreement fit into the larger context of global trade trends and technological advancements overall? That I'm very curious about. 

DE: I think it's a great question. I mean, we have the rise of digital agreements or digital-only agreements, certainly here in Asia. I sit in Singapore. Singapore now has five digital-only agreements and digital commitments in other regional agreements as well. So it's very active on the digital economy front. Digital more than anything else, though, really needs to be global. I mean, it's great if you can have a bilateral agreement between two markets about what it is you intend to do to protect digital trade and support digital trade. But ultimately what you really want is a global agreement, because digital doesn't really recognize geographic boundaries. It's not like your information hits a geographic border and says, “Oh, no, I'm not going there.” Or a vendor would say sort of, “No, I don't want to sell my product in your market because you're not protecting it properly in terms of data or whatever it has to be.”

The point is, global is better. And without global rules, even if we have a lot of bilateral or regional commitments, we may not be aligned. So, we have the potential, if we're not careful of having governments who say, “Well, we shouldn't be making unilateral rules, that's a problem. We need to coordinate. We'll coordinate bilaterally or regionally, that's better.”  But what if we're not actually paying attention to what other governments are doing and they're making bilateral or regional rules potentially that are at odds to the ones that we're making? And then suddenly, what was a very promising part of the economy as a whole, the growth of the digital world, becomes a real impediment. And you have created a system that even more privileges large companies, large companies from certain markets versus large companies from other markets. I think that's a problematic world. The reason that I'm interested in trade personally is because I think it is the fastest way to get the largest number of areas of economic growth and development. 

And digital for me is so important because that is the future. And if you don't get it right, you are making it very difficult for the developing world and for smaller firms and for companies in remote locations as well as consumers of all kinds to have the benefits of the global economy. And so it's absolutely critical that we get digital rules right and that we get them anchored in as many places as possible in alignment with one another. And so for me, the JSI is important because it's potentially half of the membership moving in the same general direction. And my hope is that we don't get tied up on how we anchor this agreement into something, but that we actually get on with implementation and make the digital world a lower risk environment for the future. Because it matters to all of us. 

AH: It does. And once again, Dr. Elms, you've done such a great job here communicating all of these things. I mean, first, for our, of course, for our listeners who don't know, there was your dissertation in which you talk about apples, and now you're here talking about paper. And I am very grateful just to listen to you, and I thank you for coming on here with us today. 

DE: Thank you so much. It’s been an honor.