DEPA (I)

Digital Economy Partnership Agreement , DEPA was signed online by Singapore, Chile and New Zealand on June 12, 2020.

At present, the top three economies in the global digital economy are the United States, China and Germany, which can be divided into three development directions of digital economy and trade. The first is the data transfer liberalization model advocated by the United States, the second is the European Union’s model that emphasizes personal information privacy security, and the last is the digital sovereignty governance model advocated by China. There are irreconcilable differences among these three models.

Zhou Nianli, an economist, said that on the basis of these three models, there is still a fourth model, that is, Singapore’s digital trade development model.

In recent years, Singapore’s high-tech industry has continued to develop. According to statistics, from 2016 to 2020, Singapore Kapi has invested 20 billion yuan in the digital industry. Backed by the vast and potential market of Southeast Asia, Singapore’s digital economy has been well developed and even known as the “Silicon Valley of Southeast Asia”.

At the global level, the WTO has also been promoting the formulation of international rules for digital trade in recent years. In 2019, 76 WTO members, including China, issued a joint statement on e-commerce and launched trade-related e-commerce negotiations. However, many analysts believe that the multilateral agreement reached by the WTO is “far away”. Compared with the rapid development of the digital economy, the formulation of global digital economy rules lags significantly.

At present, there are two trends in the formulation of rules for the global digital economy: – one is the arrangement of individual rules for the digital economy, such as depa promoted by Singapore and other countries; The second development direction is that RCEP, the US Mexico Canada agreement, cptpp and other (regional arrangements) contain relevant chapters on e-commerce, cross-border data flow, local storage and so on, and the chapters are becoming more and more important and have become the focus of attention.