USCIB hosted leadership from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and Business at OECD (BIAC) on March 9 in Washington DC, following a successful joint OECD-BIAC-USCIB Fostering Digital Transformation Conference the day prior. Nearly forty of USCIB’s leadership and members attended the meeting, including USCIB Vice Chair Rick Johnston (Citi) and Vice-Chair of USCIB’s China Committee Tad Ferris.

OECD and Business at OECD officials included OECD’s Deputy Secretary General Doug Frantz, Secretary General of Business at OECD (BIAC) Bernhard Welschke, Senior Policy Director at BIAC Nicole Primmer and Acting Head of the OECD Washington Center Susan Fridy.

This was a timely opportunity for USCIB, OECD and BIAC to have a roundtable discussion on a wide range of issues that are being addressed in the OECD such as tax, cross-border data flows, health, investment, digital trade, the Sustainable Development Goals and the G20. These issues were framed in a larger discussion of the role of business in the current political and economic climate in the U.S., about which Frantz said, “we need help from business to convey that free trade, open borders and anti-corruption guidelines require multilateral engagement. The U.S. and the U.S. business community benefit enormously from the work done at the OECD.”

Frantz also emphasized the role of digital innovation in providing future growth, prosperity and equal distribution of wealth to curtail the negative effects of the digital revolution, noting “taking digital innovation and its breakthroughs and making sure that the breakthroughs are more evenly distributed through training, skills-building and education that is based on deductive reasoning, will cushion the fall for people who are at risk of losing their jobs to the digital revolution.”