Innovation Archives - WITA

Artificial Intelligence Commission Report

Thomas Nielsen — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 10:56:44 +0000

The U.S. Chamber’s AI Commission report highlights the promise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) while calling for a risk-based, regulatory framework.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is expanding rapidly. These technological breakthroughs present both opportunity and potential peril. AI technology offers great hope for increasing economic opportunity, boosting incomes, speeding life science research at reduced costs, and simplifying the lives of consumers. With so much potential for innovation, organizations investing in AI-oriented practices are already ramping up initiatives that boost productivity to remain competitive.

Like most disruptive technologies, these investments can both create and displace jobs. If appropriate and reasonable protections are not put in place, AI could adversely affect privacy and personal liberties or promote bias. Policymakers must debate and resolve the questions emanating from these opportunities and concerns to ensure that AI is used responsibly and ethically.

This debate must answer several core questions: What is the government’s role in promoting the kinds of innovation that allow for learning and adaptation while leveraging core strengths of the American economy in innovation and product development? How might policymakers balance competing interests associated with AI—those of economic, societal, and quality-of-life improvements—against privacy concerns, workforce disruption, and built-in-biases associated with algorithmic decision-making? And how can Washington establish a policy and regulatory environment that will help ensure continued U.S. global AI leadership while navigating its own course between increasing regulations from Europe and competition from China’s broad-based adoption of AI?

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To read the full summary as it was published by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, click here.

To read the full report, please click here.

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World Intellectual Property Report 2022 – The Direction of Innovation

Sarah Wozniak — Thu, 07 Apr 2022 14:42:32 +0000

For more than a century innovation activity has grown substantially around the world. Driven by a series of technological breakthroughs from the internal combustion engine, to information and communication technologies, innovation has become one of the most powerful tools at our disposal for advancing overall welfare and wellbeing.

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To read the full report from World Intellectual Property Organization, please click here.

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Mission Critical: The Global Energy Innovation System Is Not Thriving

Jake O'Keeffe — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 19:31:48 +0000

National governments made commitments during the November 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow that will keep the goal of limiting global average temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius only barely “within reach.” These promises will ring hollow unless nations act with urgency to accelerate innovation that will make climate solutions feasible, affordable, and reliable in the coming decades. The International Energy Agency (IEA) concluded at Glasgow that “a step-change in action and ambition is needed across all energy technologies and sectors.”

Unfortunately, such action has been lacking since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015. The health of the global energy innovation system is anemic, far from the robust condition the world needs it to be in.

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To read the full report by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, please click here.

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Enabling trust, trade flows, and innovation: the DEPA at work

Johnny Morris — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 15:05:49 +0000

Three significant trends have emerged in the last decade across different forms of digital trade. First, there has been a significant increase in both volume and value. According to recent estimates, the “digital economy” comprises 15.5 percent of world GDP, with the value of e-commerce sales perhaps twice that share. The second trend involves many new regulations, often incoherent in scope and effect. As a result, the third trend is becoming more prevalent: the rise in many kinds of digital trade restrictions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these trends. According to one estimate, COVID has accelerated the digitalisation of business operations by up to a decade. The move towards more digital governance is also becoming more widespread with many recent free trade agreements (FTAs) including “e-commerce” chapters and provisions. Six months into the pandemic, however, a new kind of digital trade agreement was ratified with, very fittingly, the electronic signatures of three small, open, Asia-Pacific economies: New Zealand, Singapore, and Chile. Since that virtual signing ceremony, several similar agreements have followed or are in prospect.

In this paper, former New Zealand trade negotiator Stephanie Honey explores several policy options for digital trade governance. It outlines the innovative features of the DEPA approach and details its goal to realise the full potential of digital trade for businesses, while also safeguarding policy space for governments. The paper also reflects on the DEPA’s scope of impact, given that many of its provisions are “soft law” rather than legally binding rules – and whether flexibility might in fact be an advantage in this fast-moving area.

The DEPA at work - Hinrich Foundation white paper - Stephanie Honey - July 2021 RV

To read the original report from the Hinrich Foundation, please visit here

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WTO Annual Report: 2021

Ryan Murphy — Wed, 14 Jul 2021 18:49:18 +0000

The WTO’s Annual Report, published today (9 July), provides a comprehensive account of the organization’s activities in 2020 and early 2021. The Report opens with a message from Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and a brief overview of the past year. This is followed by in-depth accounts of the WTO’s main areas of activity.

In her opening message, DG Okonjo-Iweala says:

“The multilateral trading system has played an important part in efforts to fight COVID-19. Trade’s resilience represented a lifeline for millions, enabling access to food and other essential supplies. Now, the WTO can and must play a critical role in accelerating COVID-19 vaccine production and in ensuring a strong, sustained and inclusive global economic recovery.

“To live up to its founding objectives of using trade to help people — to raise living standards, create jobs and promote sustainable development — the WTO must deliver results this year. By responding together to a global crisis without precedent in our lifetimes, members can begin to rebuild the trust needed to address future challenges.”

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To read the full report from the World Trade Organization (WTO), please click here.

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Federal Statistical Needs for a National Advanced Industry and Technology Strategy

Jake O'Keeffe — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 17:37:36 +0000

With the rise of China and other robust economic competitors, the United States needs a more coherent national advanced technology strategy. Effectively crafting and implementing such a strategy requires the right kind of economic data. In part because of years of budget cuts to federal economic data agencies, coupled with a long-standing disregard of the need for sectoral and firm-level economic data to inform an industrial strategy, the federal government is severely lacking in the kinds of data needed.

Notwithstanding the hundreds of millions of dollars spent every year and the thousands of economists working for the federal government, the exact nature of the challenges to U.S. capabilities with regard to the competitiveness of America’s traded sectors is only weakly understood. At least since after the Great Depression, the federal government has never felt the need to develop strategic economic intelligence in order to fully understand the competitive position of its traded sectors or to help support overall economic productivity. Rather, most of the focus goes to understanding the ups and downs of the business cycle.

If the U.S. government is going to develop more effective policies to spur competitiveness, growth, and opportunity it will need to support better data collection. It should be able to understand the U.S. competitive position vis-à-vis other nations on key technologies and industries, as well as key strengths and weaknesses and where specific policies are needed.

As such, one of the most cost-effective investments Congress could make would be to significantly expand funding for federal economic and technology data collection. As part of a national infrastructure package, Congress should make a one-time appropriation to fully modernize and expand federal statistical agency IT systems. It should then increase annual funding on an ongoing basis.

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To read the full report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, please click here.

Robert D. Atkinson is the President of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation

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What is Chinese “Innovation Mercantilism” and how should the UK and allies respond?

Jake O'Keeffe — Mon, 28 Jun 2021 16:36:34 +0000

Beijing has deployed a combination of protective market policies and economic intimidation to achieve its domestic goals and ward off foreign competition. The alignment between the CCP and enterprise in China’s state-capitalist system enables the Chinese government to subsidise its commercial champions to enter foreign markets having forced foreign firms to engage in technology transfer in exchange for market access. Simultaneously, the CCP works to influence global standards bodies in an attempt to entrench the dominance of Chinese technical standards.

In the current international landscape, Beijing can cripple foreign industries by cutting off access to its domestic market. Atkinson argues that this tactic has already proven effective in recent times, with EU telecoms companies recently threatened with being shut out of the Chinese market should the bloc bring a trade case to the WTO against China for unfairly subsidising its own telecoms giants, Huawei and ZTE.

This matters to the world as China is pursuing global dominance in key industries and technologies through its Made in China 2025 scheme. It is therefore time for a new approach under which like-minded democratic nations agree to come to each other’s aid. Success would depend on members of this ‘NATO for trade’ cooperating to deter Chinese economic aggression that would harm all nations.

China’s state capitalist model and economic playbook have proven to be powerful, and it’s imperative that like-minded democracies have their own strategy, building on each nation’s technological strengths, to ensure that they can compete and prosper economically and technologically.

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To read the full report from the China Research Group, please click here.

Robert D. Atkinson is the President of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation

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Clean and Competitive: Opportunities for U.S. Manufacturing Leadership in the Global Low-Carbon Economy

Jake O'Keeffe — Thu, 10 Jun 2021 14:55:12 +0000

Majorities of Democrats and Republicans—in Washington, DC, and around the country—agree on the goal of rebuilding the nation’s manufacturing sector. This sector has historically been a key job creator, with spillovers rippling across broad regions of the country and helping to lift many workers without a college education into the middle class. A strong manufacturing base creates a more resilient and equitable economy, accelerates innovation, strengthens international competitiveness, and improves national security.

At the same time, a growing majority of Americans (along with the vast majority of scientists) are alarmed or concerned about climate change and perceive it to be an important priority for the federal government, although public opinion is less unified on this issue than on manufacturing. If the world is to meet the targets set by the Paris Agreement, the United States, along with other major world economies, will have to reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions dramatically over the next three decades. The quest for net-zero emissions will touch every sector of the global economy.

Until very recently, these two national challenges have been treated largely within their own policy silos. Policies that sought to address the decline in U.S. manufacturing were not motivated by or centered on the need to transition to a net-zero economy. Climate policies focused primarily on the electricity system, even though that sector accounts for only about 25 percent of total U.S. emissions, and devoted little energy to addressing manufacturing, which may soon become the largest emissions sector.

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To read the full report from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, please click here.

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Service Offshoring and Export Experience

Ryan Murphy — Sun, 06 Jun 2021 15:24:50 +0000

Service inputs are a key component of the costs of exporting, and contribute to explain the process of internationalization of firms. A new dataset on the participation of French firms in global value chains reveals that firms with longer export experience in a market are more likely to source service inputs from there. We rationalize this fact in a model where firms are initially uncertain about how successful they are as exporters, but learn their export profitability as they keep selling abroad. Because offshoring requires larger sunk costs than domestic sourcing, some firms decide to offshore only when they become sufficiently confident about their export prospects, i.e., once they acquire enough export experience. More export experience in a foreign destination also induces firms to offshore within the boundaries of the firm rather than at arm’s length. The model further implies that firms are more likely to offshore when frictions in the provision of services between the domestic and the foreign market are greater. In turn, offshoring firms sell greater volumes, display less volatility, and are less likely to exit foreign markets. Exploiting our novel dataset, we provide strong empirical support for each of these predictions.

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To read the full article from the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), please click here.

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Trade and Innovation

Jake O'Keeffe — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:00:39 +0000

Two central insights from the Schumpeterian approach to innovation and growth are that the pace of innovation is endogenously determined by the expectation of future profits and that growth is inherently a process of creative destruction. As international trade is a key determinant of firm profitability and survival, it is natural to expect it to play a key role in shaping both incentives to innovate and the rate of creative destruction. In this paper, we review the theoretical and empirical literature on trade and innovation. We highlight four key mechanisms through which international trade affects endogenous innovation and growth: (i) market size; (ii) competition; (iii) comparative advantage; (iv) knowledge spillovers. Each of these mechanisms offers a potential source of dynamic welfare gains in addition to the static welfare gains from trade from conventional trade theory. Recent research has suggested that these dynamic welfare gains from trade can be substantial relative to their static counterparts. Discriminating between alternative mechanisms for these dynamic welfare gains and strengthening the evidence on their quantitative magnitude remain exciting areas of ongoing research.

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To read the full article, please click here.

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