Helen Medina, USCIB’s vice president of product policy and innovation, recently attended the Trade Policy Dialogue on Digital Trade at the Third Senior Officials Meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Peru.

The objective of the meeting was to discuss digital trade rather than to define the terms of digital trade. Participants included representatives from the U.S. government, various APEC economies, OECD, and industry, including several USCIB member companies.  Provided below is a brief summary of the meeting.

The dialogue was made up of several sessions, each focusing on a different topic within digital trade. The first session discussed the research on the value of digital trade, as well as challenges posed by issues of data privacy and cross-border data regulation. The second session focused on the EU’s data privacy framework and its potential burdensome impact on APEC SMEs.

Highlights from another session included shared stories from USCIB members PayPal and Walmart on their successes within the digital trade sphere. PayPal discussed the importance of their business for SMEs; through PayPal, smaller companies are able to do business globally because people trust sending payments through their services. Walmart shared their current experience of incorporating digital information to create better services for their customers, and the necessity of open data for this process. This session also recognized the potential for growth in APEC’s future role due to its cross-regional and interagency nature, in creating policies that best help digitization of traditional economies and promote legal environments for innovation.

To follow up from this Trade Policy Dialogue, a report will be submitted to APEC’s Committee on Trade and Investment (CTI).

Digital Trade: Barbara Wanner, bwanner@uscib.org

USCIB APEC Priorities Paper (here): Elizabeth Kim, ekim@uscib.org