Digitalisation is increasing the scale, scope and speed of trade, providing new ecosystems for exchange (digital platforms) and helpings firms, especially SMEs, better connect with each other and with consumers across the globe. 

For goods, platform-enabled trade in small parcels has seen an important expansion. For services, there has been growing trade in:  

• services that were previously considered non-tradeable (e.g. health services)

• new combinations of embedded services in “smart” products (e.g. smart speakers)

• trade in new services (e.g. cloud computing, intermediation services and fin-tech).

But while the digital transformation is making it cheaper and easier to engage in trade, it is also increasing the complexity of international trade transactions and raising new challenges for market openness.

With growing interconnectedness and greater demand for just-in-time delivery, trade needs to be faster and more reliable than ever before. It also needs to meet a range of policy objectives, including privacy and data protection, consumer protection, cybersecurity and national security. In this fast-evolving environment, governments are facing new challenges in ensuring that the opportunities and benefits from digital trade, for both consumers and businesses, are realised and shared more inclusively.

To help governments understand the evolving regulatory environment that underpins digital trade, the OECD has developed a Digital Services Trade Restrictiveness Index covering domestic regulations affecting digital trade, and a Digital Trade Inventory that maps the latest developments in international discussions in this area.

Cross-border data flows have become the lifeblood of our economic and social interactions. However, as more data crosses international borders, concerns about its use and misuse have emerged. This has led to a growing number of data regulation which either conditions the movement of data or mandates that it be locally stored (data localisation measures). The challenge is to foster a global digital environment that enables the movement of data across international borders while ensuring that, upon crossing a border, data are granted the desired oversight and protection