Accra, October 4, 2017//-Worldwide e-commerce sales in 2015 reached $25.3 trillion, 90 per cent of which were in the form of business-to-business e-commerce and 10 per cent in the form of business-to-consumer (B2C) sales.
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) estimates that cross-border B2C e-commerce was worth about $189 billion in 2015, which corresponds to 7 per cent of total B2C e-commerce. Sales of robots are at the highest level ever, worldwide shipments of three-dimensional printers more than doubled in 2016, to over 450,000, and are expected to reach 6.7 million in 2020.
And by 2019, the volume of global Internet traffic is expected to increase 66 times from what it was in 2005. At the same time, monitoring the digital divide remains important. Although the number of Internet users grew by 60 per cent between 2010 and 2015, more than half of the world’s population remains offline.
The world is on the cusp of a new digital era. With dramatically reduced costs of collecting, storing and processing data, and greatly enhanced computing power, digitalization is transforming economic activities around the world.
It is expected to affect value chains, skill requirements, production and trade, and will require adaptations of existing legal and regulatory frameworks in various areas. This has major implications for the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, presenting significant opportunities, but also challenges, for developing countries.
The Information Economy Report 2017 examines the evolution of the digital economy and its potential consequences for trade and development. Although the speed of digital transformation differs among countries, all of them will need to adapt policies in several areas.
The report shows that the digital economy is creating new opportunities for trade and development. It is helping smaller businesses and entrepreneurs in developing countries to connect with global markets more easily, and is opening up new ways of generating income.
Information and communication technologies (ICTs), e-commerce and other digital applications are being leveraged to promote entrepreneurship, including the empowerment of women as entrepreneurs and traders, and to support productive activities, decent job creation, creativity and innovation.
Furthermore, mobile and digital solutions are contributing to facilitating greater financial inclusion. And small firms in developing countries with sufficient connectivity may be able to access various cloud services and obtain crowd finance in online platforms.
However, such development gains are far from automatic, and there are certain development challenges associated with the evolution of digitalization.
Many developing countries, especially the least developed countries (LDCs), are inadequately prepared to capture the many opportunities emerging as a result of digitalization.
Moreover, there is a risk that digitalization will lead to increased polarization and widening income inequalities, as productivity gains may accrue mainly to a few, already wealthy and skilled individuals. Winner-takes-all dynamics are typical in platform based economies, where network effects benefit first movers and standard setters.
Indeed, the world’s top four companies by market capitalization are all closely linked to the digital economy: Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft and Amazon.com.
There are also concerns over how data flows can be harnessed while at the same time addressing concerns related to privacy and security. The rapid pace at which the digital economy is evolving is a result of the technologies and innovations that were developed over several decades and that are becoming more pervasive.
High-speed broadband access to increasingly powerful computing and storage capacity, and drastically reduced costs of ICT equipment and data management, have facilitated the process of digitalization.
Key technologies underpinning the evolving digital economy include advanced robotics, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, big data analytics and threedimensional (3D) printing. The digital economy is evolving fast but at very different speeds The digital economy is expanding in several ways.
Global production of ICT goods and services now amounts to an estimated 6.5 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP), and some 100 million people are employed in the ICT services sector alone. Exports of ICT services grew by 40 per cent between 2010 and 2015.
African Eye Report
