High-Level Seminar

With technological breakthroughs emerging at an unprecedented pace, the associated challenges and opportunities to global economic linkages and development agenda must be understood. One of the most important realizations is that the world is transitioning into a digital era, and this fast-moving process is redefining global connectivity and the economic landscape. Specifically, by lowering transaction costs, improving information flows and broadening the scope of business, digitization enhances linkages across countries and sectors, strengthens global supply chains, and stimulates cross-culture knowledge exchanges for better innovations, all of which are critical elements for addressing the multiple challenges facing the world today. Digitization is also reshaping international trade, both physical trade and services trade. These trends call for better resource mobilization for connectivity in the digital era, in areas, including but not limited to, capital mobilization, infrastructure investment for trade, innovation and technology transfer, people-to-people exchange, policy coordination, and practical approaches to avoid digital divide. This high-level seminar will shed light on these issues.